reading "On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2". https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwaa036/5775463

p.20 shows a nice visualization of how SARS-CoV-2 has two common strains, how the virus is already evolving, as I suppose is common with viruses...

I'm not an expert on genetics or microbiology, though I've learned enough in the past to do a little bit of bioinformatics, so I read up on phylogenetic-trees https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-evolution/hs-phylogeny/a/phylogenetic-trees

In particular, this paper illustrates a "molecular phylogenetic tree" where the length of each branch represents the evolutionary distance...

the paper analyzes 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from all over the world... just to understand this a bit better, I've highlighted the 14 samples from the USA...

so there are a few divergent strains floating around the US that (unsurprisingly) originate from different places. I'm very curious if the diff strains have diff symptoms, agree w/ need to "combine genomic data, epidemiological data, and chart records of the clinical symptoms"