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

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.
  1. Ewen Callaway
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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.

References

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