Researcher Alex Sigal has followed the mutations of the coronavirus in an HIV patient over months [1], and he believes that the pattern of mutation in the Omicron variant is similar to what they had observed in that patient. So he favors the HIV scenario for the development of Omicron.
And he speculates that, given this scenario, this would increase the chances of Omicron being milder than other variants, because, as he puts it, a virus that persists for months in an immunodeficient patient is probably not particularly deadly.
It doesn’t quite match my own intuition, since the major damage of a corona infection seems to come from your own immune response, rather than directly from the virus. But my expertise is quite limited, so I trust Sigal’s gut feeling on this question much more than my own. However, I think that “gut feeling” and “speculation” does describe the level of confidence.
Researcher Alex Sigal has followed the mutations of the coronavirus in an HIV patient over months [1], and he believes that the pattern of mutation in the Omicron variant is similar to what they had observed in that patient. So he favors the HIV scenario for the development of Omicron.
One of the aspects of Omicron is that over half of the mutations are focused on the spike protein. It would be very interesting to know whether that pattern is also true for Sigal’s patient or whether the mutations in that patient are more distributed.
Researcher Alex Sigal has followed the mutations of the coronavirus in an HIV patient over months [1], and he believes that the pattern of mutation in the Omicron variant is similar to what they had observed in that patient. So he favors the HIV scenario for the development of Omicron.
And he speculates that, given this scenario, this would increase the chances of Omicron being milder than other variants, because, as he puts it, a virus that persists for months in an immunodeficient patient is probably not particularly deadly.
It doesn’t quite match my own intuition, since the major damage of a corona infection seems to come from your own immune response, rather than directly from the virus. But my expertise is quite limited, so I trust Sigal’s gut feeling on this question much more than my own. However, I think that “gut feeling” and “speculation” does describe the level of confidence.
[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/609570 (edit: corrected link)
(All infos from German magazine SPIEGEL, which is unfortunately paywalled and in German.)
One of the aspects of Omicron is that over half of the mutations are focused on the spike protein. It would be very interesting to know whether that pattern is also true for Sigal’s patient or whether the mutations in that patient are more distributed.