Being 96.2 percent similar at the level of nucleotides, as it is, RaTG13 differs by 3.8 percent. Given the pace at which coronaviruses generally mutate and evolve, that reflects about fifty years of evolutionary divergence. RaTG13 differs from the baseline virus first detected in Wuhan (known as Wuhan-Hu-1, the sequence released by Zhang and Holmes) at about 1,150 nucleotide positions, and those positions are scattered throughout the genomes. Some of the world’s best evolutionary virologists (professionals in that field, not amateurs visiting it) and coronavirus experts, including Susan Weiss,
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