Coronavirus mutations may evade human immune system - study
MOSCOW. July 30 (Interfax) - Russian researchers have uncovered mutations that enable the novel coronavirus to evade the human immune system.
"Since the emergence of the first cases of Covid-19, the coronavirus causing this disease has been mutating as it has been circulating among the population. Some of these mutations have led to the appearance of dangerous variants of the virus, which are transmitted more easily or induce a more severe disease, such as, for example, the ill-reputed Delta variant. However, if the virus stays within the same organism for long enough, it can also accumulate mutations helping it evade the immune response system," the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) said in a statement on Friday.
Researchers have monitored a patient who was sick with Covid-19 for 318 days, and tests have confirmed that she was infected with the same coronavirus all this time, it said.
"People may serve as a kind of gym for the virus, where it trains to better infect people. Although it appears that the virus that we've studied has still not left its gym, our conclusions show that there are more various workout machines in it than we thought before," the statement cites a researcher as saying.
Novel coronavirus mutations show that the virus has evolved and adapted for existing in a human body, it said.