🦠 The rise of new Covid variants is alarming – but it's probably what happened in previous pandemics, we just didn't have the technology to see it. 🔎 Analysis by TomChivers
The rise of new variants is alarming – but it’s probably what happened in previous pandemics, we just didn’t have the technology to see it. Still, high case numbers and a likely bad flu season might mean a winter of pressure on the NHS.Bywarned that we were facing a “forever plague”, as the virus “continues to evolve at a furious pace”.
But he says this is the first time that we’ve really seen a pandemic caused by a novel virus unfold in the era of rapid swab testing and genetic sequencing. We don’t know if there were frequent reinfections with different variants in the wake of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, because scientists couldn’t sequence the virus or even test mildly ill people to see if they had the flu or something else. In this pandemic, we’ve had real-time surveillance of every new variant.
That said, antibody immunity wanes, and viruses mutate. Antibodies only “remember” one very specific bit of a virus . So you might be able to get infected again a few months down the line, if a new variant arises and that bit has now changed. So when a new, deadly and highly transmissible virus, like Covid or a pandemic flu, enters the human population, you’d expect to see a really big wave of deaths and severe disease, because no one has any immunity. But then you might expect to see increasingly smaller ones, as population immunity increases.
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