02/02/2022

Omicron Could Be the Beginning of the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic

With fewer unprotected hosts to infect, viruses generally begin to falter

When Jeremy Luban first looked over the genetic sequence of the [COVID-19} Omicron variant on his phone one day last November, it was five o'clock in the morning. But even at that hour, the University of Massachusetts virus expert knew right away Omicron was a problem.

First, there was the sheer number of new mutations—by some counts, as many as 50, with 30 of them in the critical places that vaccines and drug treatments target. Second, this new version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus seemed to appear out of nowhere, unpredictably and with no immediately obvious connection to previous variants.

“It’s like when you look at the first page of a comic book and all of the Marvel villains have gotten together,” he said. “That was literally what it was like when I saw the sequence. How are we going to survive this? We can deal with one [mutation], but 10 or more of them all at once?”

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.