Emerging Dangerous COVID-19 Variants

Biologists have warned that relaxing COVID-19 restrictions when large numbers of individuals remain unvaccinated is inherently risky.

Relaxing pandemic control measures while the majority of global population remains unvaccinated risks the evolution of more transmissible and virulent COVID-19 variants.

These variants may be more dangerous for children and certain vulnerable groups, such as transplant patients with compromised immune systems. They may also escape the protection afforded by existing vaccines.

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‘The spike in COVID-19 cases worldwide may lead to dangerous coronavirus variants.’

Biologists at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom have warned about evolutionary arms race with SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in the journal Virulence.

Even in countries where vaccination has reduced the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, high case numbers and large numbers of unvaccinated individuals act as intermediate host, in which new variants can emerge.

Relaxing COVID-19 restrictions can allow the virus population to expand, which enhances its adaptive evolutionary potential and increases the risk of vaccine resistant strains emerging by a process known as antigenic drift.

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Antigenic drift refers to the continual random mutations in a virus’s genome that changes the proteins on the virus particle’s surface.

Every change in this protein has the potential to interfere with the immune system’s ability to recognize and disrupt the virus, which will reduce the protection provided by a past infection or vaccination.

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The authors also point out that during the course of the pandemic, a succession of more transmissible variants have become the dominant strains within populations.

Although vaccines have reduced the COVID-19 mortality rate in some countries, many vulnerable people are at high risk of severe disease or even death if they contract the disease.

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To slow down the rate of virus evolution, they recommend control measures such as the mandatory wearing of face masks in indoor public places until most of the population receive a vaccine.

Relaxing these measures now will be letting our guard down in the middle of the battle, and it would place us at a significant disadvantage in the arms race with the virus.

Source-Medindia