![]() ![]() Marietjie Venter, a professor in the Department of Medical Virology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said it’s unlikely that a “slow change” led to Omicron. “Omicron took everyone by surprise,” Cobey said. However, while this may explain variants that appear closer on the evolutionary tree – like Omicron and its BA.2 offshoot – it doesn’t explain how Omicron appeared in the first place. Over time and over the course of hundreds of infections, circulating viruses move further and further away from their ancestors on the evolutionary tree. “Before Omicron, I think most people in the field would say that we would see immune escape through the accumulation of these mutations one by one,” Cobey told CNN. What we know about BA.2 - now the dominant cause of Covid-19 in the US Postal Service envelope after being delivered. However, it probably won’t stop evolving in ways that skirt our immune response.īut not all mutations happen the same way.įree iHealth COVID-19 antigen rapid tests from the federal government sit on a U.S. Sarah Cobey, associate professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, explained in an op-ed in the New York Times this week that the coronavirus’ transmissibility will hit a ceiling – eventually. Or perhaps it becomes better at escaping our immunity. “Most of those errors result in a virus that’s either not competent or just dies away.”īut rarely, these accidents can give the virus an advantage. Mike Ryan, executive director of World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, in a March briefing. “As the virus reproduces itself, there are errors in reproducing its code,” explained Dr. That’s because viruses mutate – especially when their genetic code is made of RNA, a close cousin of our DNA. ![]() ![]() The virus you sneeze or cough out may be ever so slightly different from the one you were infected with. But once in a while, those mutations can work out in the virus’ favor. Viruses change all the time, often in ways that actually hurt their chances at survival. The alphanumeric soup has also revealed BA.2, a faster-spreading subtype of Omicron that has become dominant in the United States. “When that virus sequence first started to emerge, it was really hard for me to fathom that that would take off,” Emory University virologist Mehul Suthar said. With Omicron, those answers are still a mystery: How did a variant that looked so different from all its older cousins appear so suddenly? How to explain its jumble of mutations, many of which had rarely been seen in variants of interest? Stopping the next major coronavirus variant involves knowing where it might come from. ![]()
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