So I was informed that Covid-19 is an RNA virus. I wanted to better understand what that means. From an NIH article, “Human diseases causing RNA viruses include Orthomyxoviruses, Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), Ebola disease, SARS, influenza, polio measles and retrovirus including adult Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).”
The other reference I found useful is this book blurb, “About half of the 2000 known species of virus use RNA as their genomic material (the other half are the DNA viruses). All RNA viruses have small genomes, typically only 10,000 bases, and a high per base mutation rate. These two features are doubtless connected: a large genome is incompatible with a high mutation rate given that most mutations are harmful. The high mutation rate might explain why all of the major viral killers of humans are RNA viruses. The only DNA virus of comparable status was smallpox and it is perhaps not a coincidence that this is also the only virus that we have managed to eliminate.”
When I look for references to Covid-19 being an RNA virus, this is what I find, “Like other RNA viruses, SARS-CoV-2, while adapting to their new human hosts, is prone to genetic evolution with the development of mutations over time, resulting in variants that may have different characteristics than its ancestral strains. Several variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been described during the course of this pandemic, among which only a few are considered variants of concern (VOCs), given their impact on public health.”
My sense is that the concern around Covid-19 being an RNA virus is that it will mutate — since that is a characteristic of RNA viruses.
