HOUSTON, Nov 2: The novel coronavirus is accumulating genetic mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious, according to a study involving more than 5,000 COVID-19 patients in the US.
The research, published in the journal mBIO, however, did not find that these mutations have made the virus deadlier or changed clinical outcomes.
The researchers noted that the mutation, called D614G, is located in the spike protein that pries open our cells for viral entry.
“The virus is mutating due to a combination of neutral drift — which just means random genetic changes that don’t help or hurt the virus — and pressure from our immune systems,” said Ilya Finkelstein, associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, US.
The researchers noted that during the initial wave of the pandemic, 71 per cent of the novel coronaviruses identified in patients in Houston had this mutation.
When the second wave of the outbreak hit Houston during the summer, this variant had leaped to 99.9 per cent prevalence, they said.
This mirrors a trend observed around the world, according to the researchers.
The reason why strains containing this mutation outcompete those that didn’t have it may be that natural selection would favour strains of the virus that transmit more easily, the researchers said.
However, some scientists have suggested another explanation, called “founder’s effects.”
In that scenario, the D614G mutation might have been more common in the first viruses to arrive in Europe and North America, essentially giving them a head start on other strains, according to the researchers.
The spike protein is also continuing to accumulate additional mutations of unknown significance, they said.
The team also showed in lab experiments that at least one such mutation allows spike to evade a neutralising antibody that humans naturally produce to fight SARS-CoV-2 infections.
The researchers said this may allow that variant of the virus to more easily slip past our immune systems.
Although it is not clear yet whether that translates into it also being more easily transmitted between individuals, they said.
The scientists noted a total of 285 mutations across thousands of infections, although most don’t appear to have a significant effect on how severe the disease is. (PTI)

Fayetteville (US), Nov 2: US President Donald Trump on Sunday denied that he is planning to prematurely declare victory after the presidential polls are over on Tuesday, but hinted that he is gearing up for a legal battle post the election.
“No, no that was a false report,” Trump told reporters at the Charlotte airport in North Carolina amidst a news report that he is planning to prematurely declare victory on the election night. At the same time, he indicated that his team is gearing up for a legal battle on the election night itself.
“I think it is a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it is a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing,” Trump said.
“We are going in the night of — as soon as the election is over — we are going in with our lawyers,” he said as he criticised the decision taken by the Supreme Court to allow ballots to be received after Election Day in several battleground states.
“I think there is a great danger to it and I think a lot of fraud and misuse can take place,” the president said. “I think it is a very dangerous, terrible thing. And I think it is terrible when we cannot know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers. I think it is a terrible thing,” he added.
Critical of the Supreme Court decision, Trump said: “I think it is a very dangerous decision because you are going to have one or two or three states, depending on how it ends up, where they are tabulating ballots, and the rest of the world is waiting to find out. And I think there is a great danger to it, and I think a lot of fraud and misuse could take place.”
Trump said if people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before. “They do not have to put their ballots in the same day, they could have put their ballots in a month ago. And we think it is a ridiculous decision,” he said.
The president said he is doing well in the election. “We have great crowds. The first two were extremely cold. But they are great people, so that warmed it up,” he said.
“We are doing tremendous numbers. Florida is doing very well. Ohio, as you heard, is doing phenomenally well. I think we are ahead in Ohio from four years ago, and we won by eight. If you look at North Carolina, we are doing great. I think we are doing well all over,” he asserted.
“Georgia…Is in our camp all the way. Texas is beyond good. We seem to be doing well all over. And that is not based on polls, that is based on numbers based on early ballots. So we are very happy with it. I think Michigan is plus-two, it just came out. We are plus-two in Michigan. We are really doing incredibly well,” Trump said. (PTI)

NEW YORK, Nov 2: Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has listed Idli with a “really good Sambar” and “any kind of Tikka” as her favourite Indian dishes.
Born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris, 55, is the first Indian-origin and first Black woman to be picked by a major American political party for the top post.
Harris, responding to a question on what her favourite Indian dishes are, said: “So South Indian, it would be Idli with… a really good Sambar, and then North Indian – probably any kind of Tikka”.
In a video posted on Twitter on Sunday, the California Senator answered some questions asked by Instagram users.
On what she is doing to take care of her mental health on the campaign trail, she said that she works out every morning, speaks with her kids and loves to cook.
Asked what her plan is to ensure a sustainable and eco-friendly future for the coming generations, Harris said former vice president and Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden and she are prepared to make both commitments with timelines to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
“And getting there along the way by creating the jobs that are going to be necessary to get to a clean energy economy,” she said.
When asked what advice she has for women, Harris said: “You never have to ask anyone permission to lead. I have in my career been told many times, ‘It’s not your time’, ‘It’s not your turn’. Let me just tell you, I eat ‘no’ for breakfast. So, I would recommend the same. It’s a hearty breakfast.”
In response to a question on whether a vote will make a difference, she said “there are so many places where one or two votes make a difference in an entire election and your voice must be present in that decision because everything about that decision is going to impact your life.”
Harris was a presidential aspirant until last year before she dropped out of the race because of lack of popular support. She returned to the political limelight after Biden picked her as his running mate.
Biden, 77, and Harris are challenging Republican incumbents, President Donald Trump, 74, and Vice President Mike Pence in the November 3 US presidential election. (PTI)

Philadelphia, Nov 2:Joe Biden is spending the final days of the presidential campaign appealing to Black supporters to vote in-person during a pandemic that has disproportionally affected their communities, betting that a strong turnout will boost his chances in states that could decide the election.
Biden was in Philadelphia on Sunday, the largest city in what is emerging as the most hotly contested battleground in the closing 48 hours of the campaign. He participated in a “souls to the polls” event that is part of a nationwide effort to organise Black churchgoers to vote.
“Every single day we are seeing race-based disparities in every aspect of this virus,” Biden said at the drive-in event, shouting to be heard over the blaring car horns. He declared that President Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19 was “almost criminal” and that the pandemic was a “mass casualty event in the Black community”.
His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was in Georgia, a longtime Republican stronghold that Democrats believe could flip if Black voters show up in force. The first Black woman on a major party’s presidential ticket, she encouraged a racially diverse crowd in a rapidly growing Atlanta suburb to “honour the ancestors” by voting, invoking the memory of the late civil rights legend, longtime Rep. John Lewis.
But even as 93 million Americans have cast ballots and election officials prepare to count, Trump was already threatening litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after Election Day. As soon as the polls closed in battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania, Trump said, “We are going in with our lawyers.” It was unclear precisely what Trump meant. There is already an appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the counting of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania that are received in the mail in the three days after the election.
The state’s top court ordered the extension and the Supreme Court refused to block it, though conservative justices expressed interest in taking up the propriety of the three added days after the election. Those ballots are being kept separate in case the litigation goes forward. The issue could assume enormous importance if the late-arriving ballots could tip the outcome.
Biden is focuwssing on turning out Black voters in the final stretch in part to avoid a narrow outcome that could prompt Trump to seek an advantage in the courts.
It is a challenging dynamic because Democrats have spent months pushing their supporters to vote by mail. But their energy has shifted to urge Black supporters, who have long preferred to vote in person or distrust voting by mail, to get out on Tuesday.
A Biden path toward victory must include Black majority cities, including Philadelphia and Detroit, which will be crucial in determining the outcome in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those are states where both candidates have spent a significant amount of time in the final days of the 2020 election.
“The historical but also cultural reality for our community is that Election Day represents a collective political act and it is a continuation of our struggle for full citizenship in this country,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC. “Black voters are showing up in ways that they did not in 2016 and we can take heart in that.”
In Detroit, officials are projecting a 50-per cent voter turnout, which would be higher than 2016, yet lower than 2008 and 2016 when Obama’s candidacy drew record voter participation. Grassroots organisers in the Philadelphia area have spent months engaging potential voters, many of whom they expect will be casting ballots for the first time on Election Day.
“Most Black voters in Philly have been skeptical of mail-in voting,” said Joe Hill, a veteran Democratic operative-turned-lobbyist from the city. “A lot of us have gotten our ballots already,” Hill said, but added, “Election Day has always been everything in Philadelphia.”
Healthcare Pennsylvania, a local union chapter of the Service Employees International Union, is working to increase the turnout by at least 10,000 in west Philadelphia and spent the weekend knocking on more than 600 doors. West Philadelphia has a majority Black population and has experienced firsthand the convergence of the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black Americans and protests in recent days against police brutality, mirroring what has occurred nationwide.
Biden has also drawn a sharp contrast to Trump through a summer of unrest over the police killings of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and George Floyd in Minneapolis. Their deaths sparked the largest protest movement since the civil rights era. Biden responded by acknowledging the systemic racism that pervades American life, while Trump emphasised his support of police and pivoted to a “law and order” message that resonated with his base but did little to broaden his appeal.
Four years ago, Trump made his pitch to voters of colour by bellowing “What have you got to lose?” in supporting the Republican candidate and aides have pointed to pre-pandemic economic gains by people of colour.
He only won eight per cent of the Black vote, but in a development that has haunted Democrats for four years, Hillary Clinton’s margin fell seven percentage points from Obama’s in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center.
There’s little chance that Trump will win all that many more Black voters this year, though his campaign believes it has made inroads with young Black men. The president’s primary strategy has been to erode Biden’s support with a barrage of negative advertisements.
One replays Biden’s eyebrow-raising “you ain’t Black” comment, in which the former vice president questioned how African Americans could support Trump.
Another uses the Democrat’s own past words in support of the 1994 crime bill against him. The bill, which Biden helped write, led to stiffer prison sentences that disproportionately incarcerated Black men.
Trump, in a tweet on Sunday, claimed that Biden called young Black men “superpredators” — which he did not do, though he used the term “predators” in a 1993 floor speech to describe criminals.
Biden, who has a massive cash advantage over Trump, has flooded the airwaves with uplifting ads that prominently feature African Americans. One minute-long spot detailing Biden’s proposals to help Black people begins with Biden explicitly stating, “Black lives matter. Period. I am not afraid to say it.” (AGENCIES)

Fayetteville (US), Nov 2: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has said that if voted to power, he would put into place a COVID-19 action plan on the first day of his presidency.
The former vice president, during a poll event in Philadelphia on Sunday, criticised the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic which has so far killed over 230,000 people and infected 9.2 million others in the US, saying “imagine where we would be if we had a president who wore a mask instead of mocked it?
“I can tell you this: We wouldn’t have 9 million confirmed cases of COVID in this nation. We wouldn’t have over 230,000 deaths, almost 9,000 here in Pennsylvania”.
The 77-year-old Democratic leader urged people to vote out President Donald Trump, saying it is time for Trump to pack his bags and go home.
“We’re done with the chaos. The tweets. The anger. The hate. The failure. The irresponsibility. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Biden said, adding that the first step to beat the coronavirus is to beat Trump.
“On day one of my presidency, we will put into action the plan I have been talking about for months: Masking. Social distancing. Testing. Tracing. A plan for the full and fair and free distribution of therapeutics and the vaccine when we get one.
“We wouldn’t be seeing these new record numbers of cases we’re seeing every day right now. Nearly 100,000 cases nationwide on Friday alone. More than 2,600 of them Pennsylvanians. It was an all-time high,” Biden said.
He said that former president Barack Obama and he created more jobs in the last three years of their administration than Trump did in the first three years of his, before the pandemic.
“Trump is going to be the first president in 90 years who is going to finish his four years in office with fewer jobs under his leadership than he started with. That’s a lot of presidents and a lot of crises — but only Trump is going to have fewer jobs at the end of his presidency than at the start.
“I understand something Donald Trump doesn’t. Wall Street didn’t build this country. You did. Working people built this country. Unions built this country. The middle class built this country. I believe we should be rewarding work, not wealth in this country,” he said.
Delivering identical speech at another election event in Pennsylvania, Biden said that there is no limit to America’s future.
“The only thing that can tear America apart is America itself. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump has been doing from the beginning of his campaign. Dividing America. Pitting Americans against one another based on race, gender, ethnicity, national origin. That’s wrong. That’s not who we are.
“Everybody knows who Donald Trump is. Let’s keep showing them who we are. We choose hope over fear. Unity over division. Science over fiction. And yes, truth over lies. So, it’s time to stand up and take back our democracy. We can do this. We can be better than what we’ve been. We can be who we are at our best. The United States of America,” said the former vice president.
At another event, Biden said that if Americans vote, Trump does not stand a chance.
“They’ve had enough. There’s too much on the line to sit it out. In two days, we can put an end to a presidency that’s failed to protect this nation,” Biden added.
According to Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, the coronavirus has so far infected more than 46 million people and killed over 1.2 million people globally. The US is the worst affected country with over 9.2 million cases and 230,000 deaths. (PTI)