A scientist has said that they would not be surprised if more deadly variants showed up this year after Omicron. However, they warned that it is very difficult to predict how fast the mutated strain would spread and whether it would be deadlier than the previous version of the coronavirus. Speaking to Live Science, Dr Kartik Chandran, a virologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City said that omicron had an “edge” over delta both because of quickly it was spreading and because its ability to evade the immune defences of vaccinated and previously infected people.
These factors allowed Omicron to spread and reach people that the Delta variant wasn’t able to.
Dr Chandran also warned that future variants would have to outperform omicron in terms of its transmissibility and immune evasiveness.
He said: “There’s no reason to believe that the virus has run out of room, genetically.
“I would expect that we’re going to see more variants, and we’re going to see similar types of wave-like behaviour.”
While, experts are confident that new variants will pop up this year, not every new variant will be competitive enough to take over the world.
While future variants could become all-pervasive through various different routes, Karen Mossman, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University in Ontario believes that we could see a virus that’s more transmissible but less deadly.
Professor Mossmann spoke to Live Science, saying: “Viruses need to propagate and spread to new hosts.
“The most successful viruses do this by rapidly spreading without causing symptoms,”
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However, the Army was continuing to help out health services up and down the country and Mr Taylor warned there was significant regional variation and uncertainty about how quickly the wave would recede.
He said: “We seem to have peaked, but we need to be careful when thinking about how quickly we can hope for things to return to a more normal situation.
“We had not even used the word Omicron in a health context seven weeks ago, so we are still learning.
“We have had false dawns before in this terrible pandemic and we just need to keep watching.”