Be skeptical of that report that the virus is becoming more contagious

In other words, the G614 mutation may not have any effect on how contagious the virus is; it might have just hitched a ride onto strains of the virus that were spread from Europe to everywhere else. And while Hanage does think that the authors have some interesting evidence suggesting the mutation could plausibly improve the virus’s ability to spread, it’s not conclusive.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, is even more skeptical of the team’s conclusions than Hanage.

“They didn’t do a single experiment, and this is all conjecture,” she told Gizmodo. “There’s no indication that this mutation makes the virus more transmissible, and they’ve done nothing to show that this mutation is functionally significant.”