Introduction
In December 2019, an outbreak of pneumonia, which was later deduced to be due to a coronavirus, was reported in the Wuhan, Hubei Province by Chinese health officials. On January 11, 2020, the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes disease, which was named COVID-19, was published. The first outbreak in the United States of America (USA) was in Washington state on the USA West Coast and was attributed to Chinese origin of the virus, while recent studies have determined that the most intense outbreak in New York state on the USA East Coast is from SARS-CoV-2 viruses of European origin. The only dominant variation in the SARS-CoV-2 viral envelope spike protein, which executes viral glycoprotein-mediated binding to host cells and subsequent fusion of virus and host cell membranes, is mutation of an aspartate (D) at position 614 found in nearly all Chinese strains to a glycine (G) enriched in European strains. To form a better view of the global distribution and CFRs of SARS-CoV-2 variants, we calculated a linear regression of global, country-by-country CFR vs country-by-country D614 percentage and analyzed structural differences of the D to G mutation using published cryo-electron microscopy 3D structures of the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike.