COVID-19 Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon, More Dangerous Variants Could Follow Omicron: Experts

Countries across the world are battling their third and fourth waves of COVID-19 triggered by the Omicron variant, which was first identified in South Africa in mid-November and then spread like wildfire around the globe.

Despite it being dubbed as the fastest transmitting virus in history, most countries around the world including India have not imposed lockdowns like in previous waves.

One reason for this is, so far Omicron has been seen as less lethal than other major variants like Alpha and Delta.

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The majority of those infected have mild symptoms like cough and fever. Omicron also doesn't affect the lungs, making it less deadly as the infection is unlikely to lead to complications like breathing difficulties.

The 'mildness' of Omicron has also resulted in a large section of the population believing that we may have reached the end of the pandemic and that COVId-19 has lost its sting.

But scientists have warned that this is not the case and that COVID-19 is not going away any time soon from the face of the planet.

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Every infection provides a chance for the virus to mutate, and Omicron has an edge over its predecessors: It spreads way faster despite emerging on a planet with a stronger patchwork of immunity from vaccines and prior illness.

That means more people in whom the virus can further evolve. Experts don't know what the next variants will look like or how they might shape the pandemic, but they say there's no guarantee the sequels of Omicron will cause milder illness or that existing vaccines will work against them.

It's why they urge wider vaccination now, while today's shots still work.

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"The faster Omicron spreads, the more opportunities there are for mutation, potentially leading to more variants," Leonardo Martinez, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Boston University, said.

Omicron is more likely than Delta to reinfect individuals who previously had Covid-19 and to cause "breakthrough infections" in vaccinated people while also attacking the unvaccinated. The World Health Organization reported a record 15 million new Covid-19 cases for the week of January 3-9, a 55% increase from the previous week.

Along with keeping comparatively healthy people out of work and school, the ease with which the variant spreads increases the odds the virus will infect and linger inside people with weakened immune systems - giving it more time to develop potent mutations.

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"It's the longer, persistent infections that seem to be the most likely breeding grounds for new variants," said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University. "It's only when you have very widespread infection that you're going to provide the opportunity for that to occur."

Experts have also not ruled out the possibility of COVID-19 evolving into something less deadly, but added that it is unlikely.

"People have wondered whether the virus will evolve to mildness. But there's no particular reason for it to do so," Ray said. "I don't think we can be confident that the virus will become less lethal over time."

Earlier, Ravindra Gupta, Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases (CITIID), had also said that Omicron was an ¡°evolutionary mistake¡±.

"There is this assumption that viruses become more benign over time but that's not what's happening here because those are long-term evolutionary trends," Prof. Gupta told PTI.

¡°SARS-CoV-2 is transmitting very efficiently so it doesn't have any reason to become milder, especially in the era of vaccination with plenty of susceptible hosts. So I think it¡¯s an evolutionary mistake. It's not something intentional that the virus is trying to do to change its biology,¡± he said.

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