So does it matter which part of the planet a human is from as to whether the mutation would be a different type.
No, we are all one species in this regard.
There are differences in how human bodies deal with the virus, though. As an example, people with
sickle cell anemia are much less likely to get malaria. For coronaviruses, I am not aware of any regional differences in immunity or otherwise. There could be some, we just don't know yet. If there are any, it is probably related to inherited immunity from previous generations' encounters with the same family of viruses, coronaviruses, and not differences in humans per se.
In simplistic terms someone from China develops covid 19 and as it works its way around the world does it end up as something else but still covid 19 , is this the mutation that they appear to be chasing.
Each virus has its own typical mutation rate. It does not matter whether it travels around the world, or slowly infects new people in the same region, they just tend to mutate at the same rate. That is not the issue here.
The risk is that if it is true that the same person can get infected within weeks of recovering from the virus, the mutation rate is such that human immune system can't keep up. The virus looks completely new to the immune system, so it doesn't recognise it as something it needs to fight/eat. Fortunately, it now looks that this report was not that, but something like a misdiagnosis in the first place.
Secondary risk is that people with other viruses in their system, more dangerous but less virulent ones like a hemorrhagic fever, get infected. In those cases, the two viruses may exchange genetic material, with completely new variants being "created" as a result. It is not common, but it is known to happen. If this virus came to be without human intervention, this is likely how it developed in some animal (a "mix" of two different coronaviruses, I mean; I've heard of similarities to some coronaviruses endemic/typical in bats and some other species), then jumped to a human being, and started to spread.
For now, the problem in treating covid-19 is that we have no way to tag the virus for the human immune system to detect it early. It will detect it when you're already sick -- could be two to four weeks after initial infection, and you'll be spreading the virus during all that time. We have no medicine that can help the body combat the virus; we can just treat the symptoms (pain, kidney failure) and keep the patients hydrated and so on. If we could describe it to our immune cells -- that's what the flu vaccine does; the body remembers that particular description for a year or so, but as there are three different variants, it's always a bit of a guesswork which one to get/give -- they could attack it immediately, and prevent the virus from getting a foothold.
If the "native change rate", mutation rate, in the virus were so fast that the same person could be reinfected within weeks, there would be about zero hope of finding a way to tag the virus, as it changes faster than we could manufacture the tagging stuff. Again, it does not look that way, although for a couple of days, I was
quite alarmed about that. (I'm a materials scientist, a physicist, not a doctor, though.)
The reason it is important to keep track of the path of the virus, is that two to four week incubation period. If we know how the virus is passed on, we can prepare the medical facilities accordingly; basically make better guesses as to where resources are needed. When "untraceable" infections pop up, it means there are carriers we don't know about, and when they get sick, there could be many of them in the same area; and then it can be very hard to get them help in time. (Covid-19 seems to be particularly hard to the kidneys in the severe cases; many in intensive care are in dialysis, to reduce the stress on their kidneys. Otherwise its symptoms are comparable to the flu.)
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