The rhythm of pre-pandemic life is back around much of the world. Munich’s Oktoberfest tents are full, tourists are returning in Tokyo and New York, masks have come off in the subways.
The rhythm of pre-pandemic life is back around much of the world. Munich’s Oktoberfest tents are full, tourists are returning in Tokyo and New York, masks have come off in the subways. The previous two autumn seasons ended with new Covid-19 variants spurring fresh waves of cases and social restrictions. This year is different: the super-contagious but less severe omicron has shown unusual staying power — even as it spawned hundreds of sublineages.
The world has learned that the coronavirus is fickle, and as cases start to creep up again, so does concern about unpredictable developments. But if omicron’s dominance holds, it could point to a drift reminiscent of the flu’s annual changes and pave the way for Covid to settle into a more predictable pattern.
Any successor to omicron will face an uphill battle. It will need to be both more transmissible and better able to sidestep the immunity people have built, said Ralf Bartenschlager, a German virologist and professor at Heidelberg University.
“It’s like throwing dice,” Bartenschlager said in an interview. “During the replication of the virus, the dice are constantly thrown, and the best-fitting number gets an advantage.”
“We can even be happy — in quotation marks — that we now have an omicron variant that has taken over from the original strains,” he added.
The World Health Organization is tracking more than 300 sub-lineages of omicron, officials there said last week. The BA.5 subvariant that swept across the globe this summer still dominates, accounting for some four-fifths of sequences.
The multiplicity of sublineages is in some ways closer to what scientists would have expected compared with the way previous major variants emerged “out of nowhere,” looking very different than the strains that had previously dominated, said Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah.
“It’s totally possible that some strange new combination of mutations is emerging in some person who is chronically infected and that could spark a new variant,” he said, “but we don’t have the ability to predict that.”
The more infections there are, the higher the chances of unpredictable developments. And cases are on the upswing from Germany to China, which remains the notable exception to the reopening trend as the government sticks to its Covid-zero policy.
“I know some would love to believe that the pandemic is over,” Moderna Inc.’s chairman, Noubar Afeyan, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “But as the saying goes, ‘We may be done with the pandemic, but the pandemic doesn’t seem to be done with us.”’
Another complicating factor is that as countries roll back their testing programs, genetic surveillance is declining as well, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid technical lead, said at a briefing. The number of sequences being evaluated has dropped by more than 90% since the start of the year, she said, limiting the WHO’s ability to track subvariants as efficiently.
“What we don’t know is is how this virus will continue to change,” Van Kerkhove said Wednesday. “We know it will change.”
That means it’s too soon to say with certainty what will happen next. Making predictions would be akin to looking into a crystal ball, said Bartenschlager. And we won’t know that we’ve hit what could be an annual pattern until it’s repeated, according to Goldstein.
“What we have going on right now is a kaleidoscope of factors that all play into what will be our future with Covid,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Despite the avalanche of research, he said there’s still a lot that scientists have yet to learn. “If there was ever a time for humility in public health, it’s now.”
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