Table 2.

Estimated mutant frequency of the pre-existing viral variants before therapy^*

Mutant viral variants	Relative fitness**	Pretreatment frequency
V36A/M	0.98	5.00 × 10−3
T54A	0.81	5.23 × 10−4
R155K/T	0.62	2.62 × 10−4
A156V/T	0.45	1.81 × 10−4
36/155	0.82	2.87 × 10−6
36/156	0.67	1.54 × 10−6

^*A typical HCV infected patient has a viral load > 10⁶ per ml or > 10¹⁰ virions in the total extracellular body water. Thus, the total number of each pre-existing viral variant is sufficiently large (> 10⁴ virions) that prediction via a deterministic model is justified.

^**Relative fitness is from the in vitro estimates in [23].