'Worrying' study claims mutated coronavirus strain is more contagious

Scientists in California believe they have identified a new mutation of coronavirus that has emerged as the dominant and more contagious version of the virus that triggered a pandemic earlier this year.

A team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory theorises that the new strain appeared in Europe in February before migrating to the US East Coast, according to the 33-page report. The strain "rapidly" has become the dominant form of the virus since mid-March, the report says.

The report warns that the mutant strain spreads much faster than its previous iteration and within weeks had infected far more people than strains that were first reported in Wuhan, China. It then was the only discoverable strain in some parts of the world, the report says.

Scientists discovered that the mutation affects the exterior spikes of the virus, which enable it to travel respiratory cells.

The report is preliminary and has not yet been been peer-reviewed, meaning that it is not yet established information, but authors argued for an "urgent need for an early warning" as nations begin to develop vaccines and other drugs to combat the virus.

Scientists at Los Alamos, working with teams from Duke University and the University of Sheffield, analysed thousands of coronavirus sequences collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza.

The team ultimately identified more than a dozen mutations, but one mutation — D614G — changed the spikes of the virus, according to the report. The development is "of urgent concern," the report says.

"The story is worrying," study leader and computational biologist Bette Korber said on Facebook. "When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible."

The findings could obstruct efforts among global researchers racing to develop a vaccine, with the assumption or hope that the virus has not mutated significantly. Drugs designed to combat one version of the virus may not be effective against other strains.

If warming weather also fails to slow the spread of the virus, it could continue to mutate, the report suggests, while Covid-19-related drugs are introduced to larger populations and vaccines are brought to trial.

According to the report, Italy was one of the first countries to be introduced to the new mutation in February, around the same time that the original strain of the virus was first discovered in Washington state.

But by the middle of March, the new strain emerged as the dominant strain with a heavy concentration in New York.

Nearly 1.2 million people in the US have been infected with Covid-19, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The US toll accounts for roughly one third of all infections around the world.

Covid-19-related deaths in the US have reached more than 70,000.