Complex Event Analysis - Report

Key Focus

  • Coronavirus mutations affect deadliness of strains, Chinese study finds
    Chinese team finds first hard evidence that mutation can affect how severely virus harms its host
    Most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the least potent type
    Stephen Chen
    Stephen Chen in Beijing
    Published 10:41pm 20 Apr. 2020, scmp..com
    A new study by one of China's top scientists has found the ability of the new coronavirus to mutate has been vastly underestimated and different strains may account for different impacts of the disease in various parts of the world.
    Professor Li Lanjuan and her colleagues from Zhejiang University found within a small pool of patients many mutations not previously reported
  • Li and her colleagues suggested that defining mutations in a region might determine actions to fight the virus.
    "Drug and vaccine development, while urgent, need to take the impact of these accumulating mutations
  • These mutations included changes so rare that scientists had never considered they might occur.
    They also confirmed for the first time with laboratory evidence that certain mutations could create strains deadlier than others.
    "Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity," Li and her collaborators wrote in a non-peer reviewed paper released on preprint service medRxiv..org on Sunday.
    Li's study provided the first hard evidence that mutation could affect how severely the virus caused disease or damage in its host.
    Li took an unusual approach to investigate the virus mutation
  • Momentum supporting factors

  • (strains, virus)
  • Challenge supporting factors

  • (hospitals, mutations)
  • (health, mutations)
  • Work-in-progress supporting factors

  • (mutations, virus)
  • (mutations, strains)
  • (mutations, scientists)
  • (scientists, virus)
  • (strains, virus)
  • (mutations, tri-nucleotide)
  • (mutations, service)
  • (service, virus)
  • (mutations, preprint)
  • (preprint, virus)
  • Complex Event Time Series Summary - REPORT


    Time PeriodChallengeMomentumWIP
    Report7.69 5.13 87.18

    High Level Abstraction (HLA) combined

    High Level Abstraction (HLA)Report
    (1) (mutations,virus)100.00
    (2) (mutations,strains)89.29
    (3) (mutations,scientists)51.19
    (4) (strains,virus)30.95
    (5) (scientists,virus)29.76
    (6) (mutations,tri-nucleotide)22.62
    (7) (mutations,service)21.43
    (8) (service,virus)20.24
    (9) (mutations,preprint)19.05
    (10) (preprint,virus)17.86
    (11) (mutations,pathogenicity)16.67
    (12) (pathogenicity,virus)15.48
    (13) (mutations,non-peer)14.29
    (14) (non-peer,virus)13.10
    (15) (medrxiv,mutations)11.90
    (16) (hospitals,mutations)10.71
    (17) (health,mutations)9.52
    (18) (deadlier,mutations)8.33
    (19) (deadlier,virus)7.14
    (20) (virus,zhang)4.76
    (21) (scmp_research,virus)2.38
    (22) (overturns,virus)1.19

    Complex Event Analysis - REPORT

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    Supporting narratives:

    • momentum (Read more)
      • This patient spent more than 50 days in hospital, much longer than other Covid-19 patients, and even his faeces were infectious with living viral strains.
        "Investigating the functional impact of this tri-nucleotide mutation would be highly interesting," Li and colleagues said in the paper.
        Professor Zhang Xuegong, head of the bioinformatics division at the National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, said ultra-deep sequencing could be an effective strategy to track the virus'mutation.
        "It can produce some useful information," he said.
        But this approach could be much more time consuming and costly
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (strains,virus)

    • challenge (Read more)
      • Some researchers suspected the varying mortality rates could, in part, be caused by mutations but they had no direct proof.
        The issue was further complicated because survival rates depended on many factors, such as age, underlying health conditions or even blood type.
        In hospitals, Covid-19 has been treated as one disease and patients have received the same treatment regardless of the strain they have
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (hospitals,mutations)
        • (health,mutations)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • Coronavirus mutations affect deadliness of strains, Chinese study finds
        Chinese team finds first hard evidence that mutation can affect how severely virus harms its host
        Most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the least potent type
        Stephen Chen
        Stephen Chen in Beijing
        Published 10:41pm 20 Apr. 2020, scmp..com
        A new study by one of China's top scientists has found the ability of the new coronavirus to mutate has been vastly underestimated and different strains may account for different impacts of the disease in various parts of the world.
        Professor Li Lanjuan and her colleagues from Zhejiang University found within a small pool of patients many mutations not previously reported
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (mutations,virus)
        • (mutations,strains)
        • (strains,virus)
        • (mutations,scientists)
        • (scientists,virus)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • These mutations included changes so rare that scientists had never considered they might occur.
        They also confirmed for the first time with laboratory evidence that certain mutations could create strains deadlier than others.
        "Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity," Li and her collaborators wrote in a non-peer reviewed paper released on preprint service medRxiv..org on Sunday.
        Li's study provided the first hard evidence that mutation could affect how severely the virus caused disease or damage in its host.
        Li took an unusual approach to investigate the virus mutation
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (service,virus)
        • (mutations,pathogenicity)
        • (deadlier,mutations)
        • (deadlier,virus)
        • (mutations,preprint)
        • (non-peer,virus)
        • (mutations,virus)
        • (mutations,strains)
        • (medrxiv,mutations)
        • (mutations,non-peer)
        • (mutations,scientists)
        • (mutations,service)
        • (pathogenicity,virus)
        • (preprint,virus)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • Li and her colleagues suggested that defining mutations in a region might determine actions to fight the virus.
        "Drug and vaccine development, while urgent, need to take the impact of these accumulating mutations
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (mutations,virus)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • The pandemic's infection and death rates vary from one country to another, and many explanations have been proposed.
        Genetic scientists had noticed that the dominant strains in different geographic regions were inherently different. Some researchers suspected the varying mortality rates could, in part, be caused by mutations but they had no direct proof.
        The issue was further complicated because survival rates depended on many factors, such as age, underlying health conditions or even blood type.
        In hospitals, Covid-19 has been treated as one disease and patients have received the same treatment regardless of the strain they have
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (mutations,strains)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • Each building block of the virus genome was read more than 100 times, allowing the researchers to see changes that could have been overlooked by the conventional approach.
        The researchers also found three consecutive changes - known as tri-nucleotide mutations - in a 60-year-old patient, which was a rare event. Usually the genes mutated at one site at a time
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (mutations,tri-nucleotide)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • Questions such as where the virus came from, why it could kill some healthy young people while generating no detectable symptoms in many others still left scientists scratching their heads.
        "If there is a discovery that overturns the prevailing perception, don't be surprised."
        Sign up now and get a 10% discount (original price US$400) off the China AI Report 2020 by SCMP Research
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (scientists,virus)
        • (overturns,virus)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • It was unlikely to be applied to all samples.
        "Our understanding of the virus remains quite shallow," Zhang said. Questions such as where the virus came from, why it could kill some healthy young people while generating no detectable symptoms in many others still left scientists scratching their heads.
        "If there is a discovery that overturns the prevailing perception, don't be surprised."
        Sign up now and get a 10% discount (original price US$400) off the China AI Report 2020 by SCMP Research
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (virus,zhang)

    • WIP (Read more)
      • Questions such as where the virus came from, why it could kill some healthy young people while generating no detectable symptoms in many others still left scientists scratching their heads.
        "If there is a discovery that overturns the prevailing perception, don't be surprised."
        Sign up now and get a 10% discount (original price US$400) off the China AI Report 2020 by SCMP Research.
      • High Level Abstractions:
        • (scmp_research,virus)

    Target rule match count: 22.0 Challenge: 0.04 Momentum: 0.03 WIP: 0.44