Author : Dr. P D Gupta
Former Director Grade Scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad (INDIA), Email: pdg2000@hotmail.com, Cell: 080728 91356
www.daylife.page
After Omicron, What is next? We all are eager to know, infect, omicron gave us lot of information about the future of Corona. In 2020, I mentioned in my book Corona Gyan (see chapter17 How will Corona End page78) .... is to live with it...nor to be afraid of it....who knows over time it may become friendly. Even on title page it was mentioned “you have to live with it”. Now from all over the world eminent virologists expressed almost the same views.
Evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom testing old blood samples (1980’s) the presence of antibodies against for seasonal coronavirus and predicted the future of SARS-CoV-2. “that the new pathogen would not be eradicated. Rather, it would become endemic — the fifth coronavirus to permanently establish itself in humans, alongside four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that cause relatively mild colds and have been circulating in humans for decades or more”.
It is important to understand the experiment done by Bloom to reach such a conclusion. The blood samples from the 1980s contained high levels of infection-blocking antibodies against a 1984 version of common cold virus (229E). But they had much less capacity to neutralize a 1990s version of the virus. They were even less effective against 229E variants from the 2000s and 2010s. The same held true for blood samples from the 1990s: people had immunity to viruses from the recent past, but not to those from the future, suggesting that the virus was evolving to evade immunity. And so is Corona variant Omicron doing.
Scientists are searching for ways to predict the virus’s next moves, looking to other pathogens for clues. They are tracking the effects of the mutations in the variants that have arisen so far, while watching out for new ones. They expect SARS-CoV-2 eventually to evolve more predictably and become like other respiratory viruses — but when this shift will occur, and which infection it might resemble is not clear.
Due to its’ pandemic behaviour (spread all over the world) corona virus got different treatment from mankind than that of other viruses. A global vaccination push that has delivered nearly 8 billion doses is shifting the evolutionary landscape of this virus, and it’s not clear how the virus will meet this challenge. Meanwhile, as some countries lift restrictions to control viral spread, opportunities increase for SARS-CoV-2 to make significant evolutionary leaps that means we are giving freedom to the virus for its own way to mutate.
Scientists are searching for ways to predict the virus’s next moves, looking to other pathogens for clues. They are tracking the effects of the mutations in the variants that have arisen so far, while watching out for new ones. They expect SARS-CoV-2 eventually to evolve more predictably and become like other respiratory viruses — but when this shift will occur, and which infection it might resemble is not clear. (The author has his own study and views)
