“We have to invest in sorting out mild cases, and when we do that, we’ll light up the battlefield where this virus is changing and evolving,” he added. “We can wait for these dangerous variants to hit us in the face, or we can look at the subsurface evolution of this virus and predict where the virus is going.”
Some of the first signs that Omicron and later BA.2 appeared in the US came from wastewater sampling, is an inexpensive and relatively low-cost technology monitoring plan versus examining patients and reporting their results to information systems governed by state agencies and federal privacy laws. The shock of the arrival of the latest variants may be enough to spur adoption of additional data sources to flag them: passively collected cellular information, quick home test results , immunity survey via zip code or census tract.
However, all the red flags in the world will not prevent new variations from appearing. SARS-CoV-2 cannot be kicked off the planet — it has found a home in many animals—But we can deny the chance of adapting to the human immune system. Protection may be granted with prior infection, although this is not guaranteed: Omicron causes re-infection in people who already have Delta disease and breakthrough infection in people who have received the vaccine. And developing immunity through infection alone carries the risk of unpredictable illness and recovery, or Long Covidor systemic inflammation in children is called MIS-CORE.
The simpler answer is to distribute the full range of vaccines, including boosters, as widely as possible. “The best way to prevent more dangerous, dangerous, or contagious variants from emerging is to prevent unrestricted spread, and that requires a variety of integrated public health interventions, including including, importantly, vaccine equity,” said Aris Katzourakis, professor of evolution and genomics at the University of Oxford, wrote in nature last week.
Vaccine equity has always been where the world’s pandemic response stumbles and stops. Researchers say – and have said so often now that they sound desperate – that pandemic control can never be successful until vaccine access improves. All around the world, more than 3 billion people don’t get the vaccine at all.
“There is no reason why the next variant – this will happen, as billions of people, of whom billions of virus particles are replicating – by chance, could be even more sinister,” said Madhukar Pai. Omicron,” chair of the Canadian study in epidemiology and global health at McGill University. “There is no reason, from everything we have seen with this virus, to hope that the next variant will not emerge, or that Omicron will be a mass vaccination event that takes us all the way to the end. end of the pandemic.”
Interactions between vaccines and new variants can be seen in one preprinted which Grubaugh posted online last week, contains the results of a study by Yale and University of Nebraska researchers of 37,877 PCR-positive Covid tests performed while Omicron was moving to Connecticut. The study has not been peer-reviewed, Shows that two doses of the vaccine conferred some defense against Delta, forcing the rate of positive tests to drop by nearly half compared with those who were unvaccinated. Adding boosters reduces the positivity rate by 83 percent. But among those infected with Omicron, significant protection didn’t take effect until they received the booster — and even then, half of the participants still registered positive for the tests. check their Covid.
