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Covid: Is there a limit to how much worse variants can get? - BBC News

Covid: Is there a limit to how much worse variants can get? - BBC News

Covid: Is there a limit to how much worse variants can get? - BBC News
Jun 11, 2021 1 min, 40 secs

The Alpha variant, first identified in Kent, UK, performed a large jump in its ability to transmit.

So are we doomed to a never-ending parade of new and improved variants that get harder and harder to contain.

When viruses jump to humans it would be "very rare for them to be a perfect," said Prof Wendy Barclay, a virologist from Imperial College London.

There are examples of viruses, she said, from flu pandemics to Ebola outbreaks, making the jump and then accelerating.

It's the average number of people each infected person passes a virus on to if nobody were immune and nobody took extra precautions to avoid getting infected.

It is beyond anything we feared," said Dr Aris Katzourakis, who studies viral evolution at the University of Oxford.

"The fact it has happened twice in 18 months, two lineages (Alpha and then Delta) each 50% more transmissible is a phenomenal amount of change."?

"There is still space for it to move higher," said Prof Barclay.

One way the Alpha variant became more transmissible was by getting better at sneaking past the intruder alarm - called the interferon response - inside our body's cells.

"Ultimately there are limits and there isn't a super-ultimate virus that has every bad combination of mutations," said Dr Katzourakis.

The fastest vaccination programme in history will give the virus a different hurdle to overcome and squeeze it in another evolutionary direction.

"It is quite possible that changes in the virus that make it better at avoiding vaccines could end up compromising its ability to transmit in an absolute sense," said Dr Katzourakis.

Different viruses use different techniques to keep on infecting.

The virus is already off into the next person long before it kills the person it infected?

But these progressively more transmissible variants are a nightmare for the rest of the world where they are making it harder and harder to stay on top of Covid.

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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