This is how dangerous the next COVID variant will be, experts predict! As the virus continues to spread, its behaviors are likely to change and become more dangerous.
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Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been no shortage of twists and turns. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has reminded us time and again that even great advances can be undone by a simple change in viral structure that facilitates spread, makes the virus more virulent, or both. From the first signs of the beta variant to the emergence and spread of the delta variant, the number of cases and the level of concern about the effectiveness of existing vaccines depended on how the pathogen adapted and changed over time. But could things get worse? According to experts, the next COVID variant we face might look different, but probably won’t be much more dangerous or deadly than what we’ve already seen, Salon reports.
Since the early days of the pandemic, virologists and disease experts have pointed out that all viruses change and mutate over time as they continue to spread through a population. However, according to Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, viruses are more likely to become more contagious over time than they are to become deadly as part of an efficient evolution.
“You want more baby virus copies of yourself,” Gandhi told Salon. “They don’t usually evolve to kill their host more easily, because that wouldn’t be very smart.”
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Similar to animals, the evolution of microscopic pathogens tends to favor offspring that can more easily replicate and spread. At a certain point, however, scientists say, a virus can reach “peak fitness,” meaning that it becomes as efficiently contagious as it can get.
“It is to be expected that higher fitness variants will emerge over time (the emergence of which needs to be carefully monitored as they pose a potential threat to public health), but we believe that these will not be infinite. Nothing is infinite in nature, and at some point the virus will reach its form of ‘maximal transmission,'” a group of scientists wrote in a letter to the editor in the June 2021 issue of Nature. “After that, new variants will provide no further advantage in infectivity. So the virus will stabilize, and this ‘final’ variant will prevail and become the dominant strain, with only occasional, minimal variation.”
Gandhi also points out that the so-called “delta-plus” subvariant, officially known as AY.4.2, was the last version of the virus to attract the attention of public health authorities, “only because it might be more transmissible.” Fortunately, most research to date suggests that AY.4.2 poses less of a threat than the original variant did when it began spreading.
“It looks like it has a transmission advantage of 12 to 18 percent over Delta, so in that sense it’s not good news,” Dr. Christina Pagel, director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at University College London, told CNBC. “It will make things a bit more difficult, but it’s not a massive leap.”
Pagel then put the sub-variant into perspective to explain why it might be less of a concern despite its ability to spread faster. “Delta was about 60 percent more transmissible than alpha, doubling every week. With this virus, it’s one or two percent a week – it’s much, much slower. So in that sense, it’s not as big a disaster as Delta. It will probably gradually replace Delta over the next few months. But there’s no indication that it’s more resistant to vaccines, [so] I wouldn’t panic right now.”
However, other experts point out that it is crucial to keep an eye on the small changes in SARS-CoV-2 to ensure that vaccines continue to be effective against the virus. “Most of the genetic changes we see in this virus are like the scars people accumulate over a lifetime – random markers of the pathway, most of which don’t have much significance or functional role,” Dr. Stuart Ray, associate chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a blog post published by the university. “Updated versions of current vaccines are being evaluated, but there are no clinical trials yet to demonstrate that variant-specific vaccines would provide significantly greater protection. Although SARS-CoV-2 is gradually changing, it is still much less genetically diverse than influenza.”
