What scientists say about next Covid variant
The Delta outbreak is going to get much worse, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who leads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota has warned, as per a report by the Newsweek. “The number of intensive-care beds needed could be higher than any time we’ve seen,” Osterholm has been quoted as saying.Delta, the variant first identified in India in December, spreads faster than any previous strain of SARS-CoV-2, as the Covid-19 virus is officially named. The world is in a very “dangerous period” of the Covid-19 pandemic compounded by more transmissible variants like Delta, which is continuing to evolve and mutate, World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has recently warned. 85104887SARS-CoV-2 does not have a lot of genetic material to scramble compared with most organisms — about 15 genes, versus about 3,000 genes in an E. coli bacterium, the stomach bug, and about 20,000 in a human cell. Covid-19 has genetic checking mechanisms that make it reasonably adept at avoiding replication mistakes compared to most viruses. Its mutation rate is on the lower side — about one mutation for every 10 replications, or around a fifth of the flu’s mutation rate and a tenth of HIV’s. However, a single infected person might carry 10 billion copies of the virus, enough to produce billions of mutated viruses every day, the Newsweek report has said.Every million or trillion times, a random mutation confers some potentially dangerous new characteristic, the article said. Much of what makes the virus dangerous has to do with the so-called spike proteins that protrude from its surface and enable the virus to latch onto and penetrate human cells. 84085921So far, most mutations represent tweaks to these spikes, which means it only takes a minimal change within any of the few viral genes that control the spikes to create a newly threatening mutation.However, even when a virus mutation sharpens its ability to wreak havoc, it does not mean a dangerous new variant has emerged. The Newsweek has reported that to become a significant variant, a mutated virus has to out-replicate the far more numerous copies of the virus that already predominate in the population, and to do that it needs features that give it big advantages.The chances that a virus in the population will produce a much more dangerous variant in the course of a year would normally be extremely low. But when billions of people are infected with billions of copies of a virus, all bets are off.’Living Covid mutation labs’Due to Delta’s infectiousness, and the huge number of people whose refusal or inability to get vaccinated leaves them primed to become living Covid mutation labs, the conditions are ripe to produce yet more, potentially more dangerous, variants in the coming months, the Newsweek report said.The report also raised a question: When the damage from Delta starts to subside, what other variants will be lurking just behind it to pull us back down again? WHO is already keeping an eye on several: Eta, Kappa, Iota, and Lambda.’Next variant can be Delta on steroids’Is there a variant out there that shrugs off vaccines, spreads like wildfire and leaves people much sicker than seen so far? The report by Newsweek says the odds are not high that we will see such a triple threat, but experts can’t rule it out. Delta has already shown how much worse things can get. Its extreme contagiousness. The report quotes Osterholm, as saying “The next variant could be Delta on steroids.”Experts’ speak on the variant”All coronaviruses mutate, and we knew this one was mutating, too,” says Sharone Green, a physician and infectious disease researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “But we didn’t think the mutations would so strikingly affect transmissibility and possible evasion of immunity,” the Newsweek report quoted Green. “A virus’ job is just to keep propagating,” says Green. “Any mutation that helps the virus survive and spread will make it more successful as a variant.””It’s going to be very difficult to stop it from happening with masks and social distancing at this point,” says Preeti Malani, a physician and infectious disease researcher and chief health officer at the University of Michigan. “Vaccines are the key, and vaccine hesitancy is the obstacle.” It’s not yet clear whether or not Delta is hitting the younger harder. “It’s a mystery right now,” Malani says.There’s no reason to assume Delta represents any sort of ceiling in infectiousness. “I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised if something else came along that’s even more transmissible,” says Eric Vail, director of molecular pathology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.WHO director general Tedros has recently said that in countries with low vaccination coverage, terrible scenes of hospitals overflowing are again becoming the norm. ‘Highly contagious variant’The highly contagious Delta variant of coronavirus spreads as easily as chickenpox and appears to cause a more severe form of illness compared to other variants, media reports quoting an internal document from the US health authority said. The document from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obtained by The Washington Post, described the Delta strain as “a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus”.It said that Delta, which was first identified in India last year, leaps from target to target more swiftly than even Ebola or the common cold. 84889119Delta, more than any other variant, has reset scientists’ understanding of how quickly a virus can evolve into devastating new forms. It may seem surprising that scientists were caught off-guard by the rapid emergence of a more dangerous variant, the report says. If Covid-19 keeps mutating away from vaccine effectiveness and natural immunity, and a large portion of the population continues to neglect vaccinations, then we’ll indeed end up permanently haunted by the virus, Newsweek report also read.
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