Read these excerpts to find out, and check out the entire article here.
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"Rat droppings from New York City. Poop from dog parks in Wisconsin. Human waste from a Missouri hospital. These are some of the materials that are readying us for the next chapter of the coronavirus saga.
"More than four years into the pandemic, the virus has loosened its hold on most people’s bodies and minds. But a new variant better able to dodge our immune defenses may yet appear, derailing a hard-won return to normalcy.
"Scientists around the country are watching for the first signs.
“We’re not in the acute phases of a pandemic anymore, and I think it’s understandable and probably a good thing” that most people, including scientists, have returned to their prepandemic lives, said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.
“That said, the virus is still evolving, it’s still infecting large numbers of people,” he added. “We need to keep tracking this.”
"Dr. Bloom and other researchers are trying to understand how the coronavirus behaves and evolves as populations amass immunity. Other teams are probing the body’s response to the infection, including the complex syndrome called long Covid.
"And some scientists have taken on an increasingly difficult task: estimating vaccine effectiveness in a crowded respiratory milieu.
"Intellectually, this virus, to me at least, is only becoming more interesting,” said Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.
“In some ways, SARS-CoV-2 has been a fabulous reminder of some of the deepest questions in the field, and also how far we have to go in answering a lot of them.”
"Closely analyzing new variants appearing in wastewater may help predict what additional forms may surface, said Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri, who has hunted for iterations of the coronavirus in stool samples from rodents and humans.
“They help inform the evolution of this virus and what’s likely to
happen next, and possibly could even inform how to make a better
vaccine,” Dr. Johnson said.
Spotty Surveillance
"Scientists looking for signs of renewed danger are constrained by the limited surveillance for coronavirus variants in the United States and elsewhere.
"Many countries, including the United States, ramped up tracking efforts at the height of the pandemic. But they have since been cut back, leaving scientists to guess the scale of respiratory virus infections. Wastewater and hospitalizations can provide clues, but neither is a sensitive measure.
“We never have had especially systematic surveillance for respiratory pathogens in the United States, but it’s even less systematic now,” Dr. Cobey said. “Our understanding of the burden of these pathogens, much less their evolution, has been really compromised.”
"Not tracking viruses closely has another consequence: With multiple respiratory viruses to combat each year, it is now extremely challenging to gauge how effective the vaccines are.
"Before Covid, scientists estimated the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine by comparing the vaccination status of those who tested positive for flu with those who did not.
"But now, with vaccines for Covid and respiratory syncytial virus in the mix, the calculations are no longer simple. Patients turn up at clinics and hospitals with similar symptoms, and each vaccine prevents those symptoms to a different degree."
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It sounds like we're not prepared for the next coronavirus, or the next variant. Just look around: nobody is wearing a mask, and nobody is talking about COVID, while the cautious among us are just waiting for the next shoe to drop.
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