As long as the COVID-19 virus continues infecting people, it will keep replicating inside them, however, that does necessarily mean the new variants will keep on developing as regularly, or even that the new variants will be more dangerous.
Over half of the worlds’ population is still not vaccinated which makes it highly likely that the virus will continue finding people to infect and replicate inside the host bodies for many months or years to come.
Every time a virus develops a copy of itself, a small mutation could take place. Those changes could enable the virus to survive by evolving into new variants. This, however, does not imply that the virus will continue evolving in a manner similar to how it emerged during late 2019.
A virus expert at Pennsylvania State University Andrew Read said that when a virus infects a new species, it requires an adaptation to the new host in order to spread more widely.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the delta variant is twice as contagious as the earlier versions of COVID-19. According to a virus and infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan Dr. Adam Lauring, while the virus can still mutate and become increasingly infectious, it will most probably not double its transmission rate again.
Lauring added, “We’ve seen a stage of rapid evolution for the virus. It’s been harvesting the low-hanging fruit, but there’s not an infinite number of things it can do”.
It is a possibility that the virus could become more deadly, but there is no evolutionary reason for that to happen. It is less likely for extremely sick people to socialize and spread the virus to others.
Experts are on the lookout to find whether emerging variants could better evade the protection people develop from vaccination and infections. a virus expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Dr. Joshua Schiffer says that as an increasing number of the world population get the vaccine shots, the virus would need to be able to spread via people who have some immunity for it to survive.
He added, “The virus could take on a mutation that makes the immune response less effective”.
In that scenario, scientists might recommend that vaccine formulas should be updated periodically, similar to the annual flu shots.
