The Los Alamos National Laboratory has posted a new study, as reported this week by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, that finds that the strain of the novel coronavirus that emerged in Europe and has spread to much of the world is different than the strain of the virus at its origin in China. Those findings are consistent with our research which we posted (in Russian) on April 15, 2020. Although we are not epidemiologists, we are posting our slightly updated analysis below in English in the interest of sharing what may be significant findings with a wider audience. We welcome the scrutiny and consideration of the epidemiology community and hope that our analysis and any corrections or critiques to the below will help advance our knowledge.
From a microbiological point of view, there are several varieties of the SARS-CoV‑2 coronavirus. But from the epidemiological point of view, the world is dealing with two distinctly different supertypes of the coronavirus – the so called “East Asian” and “European” ones.
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