Is covid-19 settling into a pattern?

Is covid settling into a pattern?“It appears that there are two to three waves a year, each caused by new variants,” says Atsushi Sakuraba, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, USA. “Considering the nature of SARS-CoV-2, which is an RNA virus that mutates over time, this pattern is likely to stay.”Each new variant’s dominance—usually from increased transmissibility or from mutations that help it to partially evade immunity and allow reinfection—comes from outcompeting existing variants and brings a surge of infections, aided by the easing of restrictions and waning vaccine immunity (fig 1).bmj;378/sep15_2/o2183/F1F1f1Fig 1Waves of infectionCredit: Our World in DataLawrence Young, a virologist at the University of Warwick, UK, says, “We’re getting plateaus [peaks in case numbers] in between waves of infection, and the set point for those plateaus is a little bit higher each time, as the virus is changing.“What we’re seeing at the moment is essentially the…
Read Original Article: Is covid-19 settling into a pattern? »