October 25, 2022: It’s been about a year since a new variant of COVID-19 was named, leading some to wonder if the virus is evolving in the same way as before.
NPR asked a dozen scientists if the virus was stabilizing, and the answer was a resounding “no”: COVID-19 continues to evolve as temporarily as ever.
“SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve rapidly,” biology professor Trevor Bedford, PhD, told NPR. “There is no evidence that evolution is slowing down. “
Thus, while the wave of changes in the virus continues, the naming is paralyzed because the houses that would cause a new variant baptized have already appeared.
New subvariants of Omicron, such as BQ. 1 and BQ. 1. 1, have made headlines recently as they account for a higher proportion of new cases. But they did not get new names due to their similarity to the original variant of Omicron. These similarities are the characteristics of Omicron that spreads and survives, even in vaccinated people.
“We seem to see for the first time evidence of convergent evolution at scale,” Manon Ragonnet-Cronin, PhD, a scientist at the University of Chicago, told NPR. “We have what other people call a swarm of Omigron viruses, which have other ancestors within Omicron, but have the same set of mutations. “
The call is controlled by a team of scientists from the World Health Organization, which evaluates existing adjustments in COVID-19 and uses a complex set of criteria to determine whether a call deserves to be assigned. WHO also maintains lists of “variants of concern. “” and “variants of interest,” as the CDC does in the United States. The CDC publishes its list of variants that are or have been monitored and when their prestige has changed.
While the convergence to the Omicron characteristics that the current state of the virus is booming, it has also raised hopes among some scientists.
University of Bern epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft, PhD, told NPR, “The fact that we may have come out of a phase [of the pandemic] where we’re getting absolutely new viruses from other parts of the tree that are invading and dominating may also just be a sign that we’re moving toward some kind of more robust long-term for the virus. “
SOURCES:
NPR: “Omicron Continues New Evolutionary Tricks to Thwart Our Immunity,” October 25, 2022.
World Health Organization: “Monitoring for SARS-CoV-2 variants. “
CDC: “Classifications and definitions of SARS-CoV-2 variants. “
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