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Four years of COVID-19; its origin and evolution [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-27
With four years of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, a couple of scientists put together some good summaries of where things stand with understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 evolution and origins. First, Mark Johnson (known for tracking new variants using wastewater surveillance) compiled a Twitter-thread on SARS-CoV-2 viral evolution since it jumped into people. Ben Pierce compiled a review of how and where SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population, with a focus of the ‘tells’ from the conspiracy theory crowd.
As we enter the fifth year of the pandemic, there is still a lot of uncertainty — both in where the disease came from and where it’s going. COVID-19 is still much more damaging than the seasonal flu. While some people hope that we continue to build stronger immunity to it, we are already over the big hump with building immunity — almost everyone has been vaccinated and/or infected more than once. We also are facing a new, rapidly increasing variant, going by names such as BA.2.86, JN.1, and “Pirola”. This is not a repeat of the “Omicron event” of December 2021, and may give us a sense of the scale of illness we can expect from future SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary leaps every few years.
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