Corona Virus continues to mutate, is it possible to give birth to an 'Almighty' Virus

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It is clear that we are currently dealing with a virus that spreads more easily – perhaps twice as fast – than the version that emerged in Wuhan in late 2019. The Alpha variant, first identified in Kent, England, represents a huge leap in its ability to transmit. Now the Delta variant, first discovered in India, jumps even further. This means that evolution is happening.

So are we going to keep getting new variants that are getting harder and harder to overcome? Or is there a limit to how vicious the coronavirus can mutate?

It is important to remember the journey of this virus. It has jumped from a completely different species – its close relatives are bats – to humans. It’s like starting a new job: you are competent, but immature. The first variant of the coronavirus was capable enough to start a pandemic, but now it’s learning by doing.

When viruses jump into humans, “very rarely are they already in perfect condition,” said Professor Wendy Barclay, a virologist from Imperial College London. “They settled first, and then grew.”

There are examples of several viruses, he said, from the flu pandemic to Ebola, which jump to humans and then spread rapidly. So how far can the coronavirus evolve?

The easiest way to compare the biological spread of a virus is with the reproduction number, or R. This is the average number of people a person can transmit who becomes infected with the virus if none of those people are immune and take infection-prevention measures.

For example, an R number of 1 means that one infected person transmits the virus to one other person on average. The coronavirus R number was around 2.5 when the pandemic started in Wuhan and can be as high as 8.0 for the Delta variant, according to modeling experts at Imperial College. .

“This virus often surprises us. It’s much worse than we feared,” said Dr. Aris Katzourakis, who studies virus evolution at the University of Oxford. “The fact that two lineages emerged (Alpha and then Delta) in just 18 months, and each one was 50% more infectious, is a very big change.”

It is “ridiculous”, according to Dr. Katzourakis, to try to determine the extent of the change, but he can expect a surge in transmissions in the next two years.

Other viruses have much higher R numbers and the record holder, measles, can cause outbreaks explosively. “There is still room for further development,” said Prof. Barclay. “[Angka R] measles between 14 and 30, depending on who you ask, I don’t know what it will turn out to be.”

So how do the coronavirus variants spread better?

There are many tricks that viruses can do, for example:

improve the way it opens doors to our body’s cells
to last longer in the air
increase the “viral load”, so patients can inhale or spread more virus
change the stage of infection when it spreads to other people

One way the Alpha variant becomes more contagious is by becoming more adept at sneaking past the ‘intruder alarm’ in our bodies, called the “interferon response”.

But this doesn’t mean that once we’ve exhausted the entire Greek alphabet and reach Omega we’ll end up with an unstoppable beast variant. Katzourakis.

There’s also a concept called evolutionary trade-offs: in order to get better at one thing, an organism usually gets worse at another. The fastest vaccination program in history will present the coronavirus with various hurdles and influence the course of its evolution.

“It’s possible that changes that make a virus better avoid vaccines ultimately reduce its ability to transmit,” said Dr. Katzourakis.

He thinks the Beta variant is one such example. The variant has a mutation called E484K, which helps it evade the immune system; but it has not spread widely.

However, the Delta variant has mutations that help it spread while partially evading the immune system. What will be the optimal strategy for the coronavirus is still difficult to predict. Different viruses, different techniques to continue to infect.

Measles is highly contagious, but leaves a lifelong immunity so it must always find new victims. While Influenza’s R number is much lower, slightly above 1, it is constantly mutating to evade the immune system.

“We are in an interesting and unpredictable middle phase, no one knows what it will be like one year from now,” said Prof. Barclay.

One claim that is often voiced, but not favored by scientists, is that the coronavirus must reduce its severity in order to spread more easily. The claim assumes that the more virulent a virus is, the more difficult it is to spread because the host can quickly die.

But there isn’t enough evolutionary pressure on the coronavirus to cause that to happen. The corona virus usually spreads to other people long before it kills the person it infects. And the people who spread the virus the most (young people) weren’t the ones who got seriously ill.

In rich countries with good vaccination programmes, it is hoped that subsequent variants will not be a major problem since most of the population is already immune.

However, this increasingly easy-to-spread variant becomes a nightmare for other countries, which will find it increasingly difficult to cope with Covid.