Beyond Omicron: what’s next for COVID’s viral evolution

3 min read Original article ↗

The rapid spread of new variants offers clues to how SARS-CoV-2 is adapting and how the pandemic will play out over the next several months.

An abstract phylogenetic tree with some virus shapes changing form along it

Illustration by Ana Kova

As the world sped towards a pandemic in early 2020, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom gazed into the future of SARS-CoV-2. Like many virus specialists at the time, he predicted 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.

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Nature 600, 204-207 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03619-8

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 05 January 2022: An earlier version of this story had incorrect information about the R0 of seasonal coronaviruses and polio in comparison to SARS-CoV-2. These comparisons have been removed.

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