Ugh, COVID-19 On Indefinite Repeat?

 

For today's bite-sized post here's a cheerful thought: What if you could get COVID-19 not once, or not twice, but over and over again—even several times in the same year? That's the depressing prospect that is being considered now, according to an article in the New York Times.

The problem is that the virus is continuing to mutate, and is currently doing so from a base of the Omicron variant, which was good at evading antibodies from vaccinations and previous infections to begin with. As it continues to spin off new sub-variants, these can be expected to evolve in the direction of acquiring mutations that make it more contagious and/or even better at evading immune responses.

Juliet Pulliam, an epidemiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa was quoted in the article as saying

It seems likely to me that that’s going to sort of be a long-term pattern. The virus is going to keep evolving and there are probably going to be a lot of people getting many, many reinfections throughout their lives.

Awesome! It's like we're trapped with this thing inside the Hotel California. Time to root for those army guys working on a universal vaccine.

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