Omicron looks ominous. How bad is it likely to be?
Much has been learnt about how to treat covid-19 and how to live with it
VIROLOGISTS WILL tell you that predicting how a new virus might evolve is a fool’s errand. Predicting that it will evolve, though, is money in the bank. The virus that causes covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, is no exception. Since the first copy of its genome was published on January 10th 2020, sequenced from a sample collected in Wuhan days earlier, some 5.6m SARS-CoV-2 genomes have been added to GISAID, a database. They have been arranged into 23 clades—groupings with a distinct common ancestor which differ from the original sequence and from all the others in at least one particular. Each clade has had the chance to outcompete the other versions, and almost all have failed. Most differences do not make much of a difference. Then again, some do—spectacularly so.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Watchful waiting”
Briefing December 4th 2021
From the December 4th 2021 edition
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