The emergence of a new variant is just a matter of time, so what’s next after Omicron?
brought a fresh wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections and anxiety at the start of 2022, some nations are starting to record a decline in case numbers. But after two years of oscillating between pandemic surges and retreats, even people in these countries cannot help but wonder“I think it is inevitable that we will see new variants with varying degrees of immune evasion,” says Andrew Rambaut, who studies viral evolution at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
There is no way to know for sure when a variant will become dominant, or whether it will rise to the status of a ‘variant of concern’ — meaning that there are signs that it has picked up worrying new properties, such asThe public is most familiar with the first dominant sub-variants of Omicron and Delta. But researchers have been tracking a host of related sub-variants that are jockeying for dominance. In the United Kingdom, for example, one Delta variant called AY.
Such dynamics are probably common in viral pathogens. But the world has not followed a viral infection so closely before, says Page, and as a result, scientists had been missing out on the fine print. That close scrutiny, however, is already diminishing: COVID-19 testing rates in the United Kingdom have declined, he notes, in part because Omicron tends to produce relatively mild disease.
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