A look at how the virus will evolve
What do financial market predictions and virus predictions have in common? They're usually wrong.
With the global economy and markets so reliant on what happens next with the coronavirus, that makes predicting the future at the moment especially hard.
A great article in Science looks at what will happen next but first starts with previous predictions from University of Sydney export on viral evolution Edward Holmes, who in May 2020 offered his best guesses on what would happen next.
"A year on I've been proven pretty much wrong on all of it," Holmes said.
He had guessed it would make people less sick over time and that it would not get better at transmission. The opposite appears to be the case.
Does that mean the trend will continue? Here are some highlights from the article:
- With delta and re-infections, herd immunity is likely impossible
- Various levels of immunity and high infections mean this is the time when the virus will change the most rapidly
- Some think the virus will get better at infecting and become more deadly but it could take years, allowing for vaccines
- The UK variant -- Alpha -- was about 50% more transmissible and Delta is another 40-60% more transmissible than that
- The most-infectious disease is measles, which is 3x more transmissible than Delta. That's the upper limit on transmissibility
- Even with sample and full genomes, scientists can't predict which strains will be more transmissible and aren't even sure why some strains infect better
- The main risk is a strain that escapes vaccines and immunity via prior infections
The short answer to all of this is that we simply don't know and that it's certain that delta isn't the final chapter.
