You’ve no doubt recently heard something about multiple new emerging variants of COVID-19 being identified around the world and perhaps you're wondering where they all suddenly came from.
The past few months have seen a whole reel of reports speaking about new strains of COVID-19: the UK variant, the South African variant, and the Brazil variant, just to name a few.
“It is an interesting observation that we have multiple concerning variants now emerging at a similar time point.
It may be that there are now slightly different selective pressures on the virus than earlier in the pandemic; whether that is some degree of immunity in the population, a mutational pressure on the virus, or perhaps changes in climate - though potentially concerning variants have been detected in both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere,†Dr van Dorp added.