"An Army of COVID Viruses"

Andrew Nikiforuk, a great reporter with The Tyee, has written an excellent article about the COVID pandemic that everyone, especially the deniers and the minimizers, should read right away.

It's called "We Now Face an Army of COVID Viruses", and he says, "The pandemic has not ended. It is evolving, with big implications. Here are six."

1. One virus has become many.
2. The new COVID soup is a unique experiment in evolution.
3. What were viral peaks are now a constant rising sea of infections with high and low tides.
4. One pandemic has morphed into regional epidemics.
5. Reinfections rarely happened. Now they are commonplace.
6. We can do more to blunt the evolutionary threat of COVID subvariants.

He sums up the article with this:

"So the pandemic is not over. Viruses, one of the most abundant entities on this planet, don’t stand still. They mutate. They shift. They adapt.

The more a virus transmits; the more opportunities it can exploit to change its shape and character. Infections and repeated infections where random mutation and non-random natural selection lead to variants better adapted to the environment in which the viruses survive and reproduce — namely us.

We can do better at recognizing this reality and collectively respond to save lives and limit constant waves of infection. We can:

Broaden our vaccine-only policy to an anti-transmission strategy that is more varied and flexible with one goal: limiting the circulation of the virus.

Set new standards to clean the air in our schools and workplaces to dramatically reduce viral spread in the public.

Educate people about the multiplying benefits of wearing masks in public places and make effective masks easily available to the public and health-care workers.

Pour more resources and effort into improving variant-proof vaccines.

Hear from our leaders a more engaged, accurate and sophisticated discussion of where we’ve arrived in this pandemic and why, no, it is not close to being over.

Such public discourse must acknowledge hard truths about the risks of repeated infection, on COVID and uncertainties about the changing burden of disease.

From where we stand today, viral evolution, which is never linear, can pursue many futures, as evolutionary biologist Gregory has written. 

An immunocompromised host could produce a variant capable of launching another major wave like the original Omicron.

Animal reservoirs could add something surprising or nasty to the evolutionary party, too.

China’s explosion of infections in 1.4 billion people could generate its own bold new variant.

Two viruses with wildly different parents could recombine in human hosts and also alter the pandemic.

Or one of Omicron’s four lineages could evolve in a different direction altogether. 

In any case the pandemic will continue to evolve.

Will our response?"