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What the Future May Hold for the Coronavirus and Us - The New York Times

What the Future May Hold for the Coronavirus and Us - The New York Times

What the Future May Hold for the Coronavirus and Us - The New York Times
Oct 15, 2021 3 mins, 13 secs

What many scientists had not counted on was unchecked global spread.

We are extremely unlikely to eradicate the virus, scientists say, and what the next few years — and decades — hold is difficult to predict.

“The virus is just better at transmitting from one person to another than it was in January of 2020,” said Jesse Bloom, an expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

“And this is due to a variety of mutations that the virus has acquired, some of which we understand and some of which we don’t.”.

As the virus spread, more mutations sprang up, giving rise to even more transmissible variants.

First came Alpha, which was about 50 percent more infectious than the original virus, and soon Delta, which was, in turn, roughly 50 percent more infectious than Alpha.

There are likely to be some basic biological limits on just how infectious a particular virus can become, based on its intrinsic properties.

For now, Delta is so infectious that it has managed to outcompete, and thus limit the spread of, these stealthier variants.

But as more people acquire antibodies against the virus, mutations that allow the virus to slip past these antibodies will become even more advantageous.

“From the point of view of the virus, it’s no longer, ‘I just bop around, and there’s a free host.’”.

The good news is that there are many different kinds of antibodies, and a variant with a few new mutations is unlikely to escape them all, experts said.

Whether the virus will become more virulent — that is, whether it will cause more serious disease — is the hardest to predict, scientists said.

Because people who are hospitalized may be less likely to spread the virus than those who are walking around with the sniffles, some have theorized that new viruses become milder over time.

One commonly cited example is the myxoma virus, which Australian scientists released in 1950 in an attempt to reduce the population of invasive European rabbits.

Initially, the myxoma virus proved to be “fantastically virulent,” one scientist wrote, killing more than 99 percent of the rabbits it infected.

After just a few years, however, several somewhat milder strains of the virus emerged and became dominant.

But myxoma is not a simple story of a virus gradually becoming less virulent.

As long as that remains true, the virus could become more virulent without sacrificing transmissibility.

Moreover, the same thing that makes the virus more infectious — faster replication or tighter binding to our cells — could also make it more virulent.

Although many possible paths remain open to us, what is certain is that SARS-CoV-2 will not stop evolving — and that the arms race between the virus and us is just beginning.

We lost the first few rounds, by allowing the virus to spread unchecked, but we still have powerful weapons to bring to the fight.

Eventually, as viral evolution slows down and our immune systems catch up, we will reach an uneasy equilibrium with the virus, scientists predict.

Some scientists predict that the virus will ultimately be much like the flu, which can still cause serious illness and death, especially during seasonal surges.

“My guess is that one day this is going to be another cause of the common cold,” said Jennie Lavine, who explored that possibility as an infectious disease researcher at Emory University

Of course, plenty of uncertainties remain, scientists said, including how long it will take to reach equilibrium

But much of the world remains unvaccinated, and this virus has already proved capable of surprising us

While we can’t guard against every eventuality, we can tip the odds in our favor by expanding viral surveillance, speeding up global vaccine distribution and tamping down transmission until more people can be vaccinated, scientists said

The future, he said, “depends much, much more on what humans do than on what the virus does.”

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