Is it getting more frequent because it’s in a part of the country in which the rate of the increase is going faster anyway and therefore inevitably it’s a higher proportion? Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told the government press conference. Or is it that this virus itself is possible to transmit more easily? That isn’t really yet clear.
Mutations in viruses are a fact of life. They happen literally all the time. Fortunately for us SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) doesn t mutate very much by virus standards. Only about two or three times every month. And from genetic sequences being collected by researchers and public health labs across the world we ve now identified tens of thousands of different variants of SARS-CoV-2.