Recently, scientists at the University of Washington developed a new method to measure how quickly it's mutating or evolving. In South Africa, the U.K., Brazil, all of the sudden it looked like SARS-CoV-2 was mutating a lot. INSKEEP: You know, when this was happening, when the news was breaking, it sort of made intuitive sense to me because I knew that it had infected so many millions of people that the virus had many chances to evolve.ĭOUCLEFF: Yeah, that's right. UNIDENTIFIED ANCHOR #2: More countries are detecting that new, highly contagious variant of the disease. UNIDENTIFIED ANCHOR #1: Tonight, London on lockdown - scientists there believe that this variant. LESTER HOLT: Tonight, the race to stop a new, highly contagious strain of coronavirus. And then in December last year, right around the holidays - remember? - that's when everything changed. How quickly is that happening?ĭOUCLEFF: Well, at first, during the first year of the pandemic, it looked good. So it really depends on how fast SARS-CoV-2 is mutating. And that's one reason why you can get reinfected over and over again with the flu. And those mutations can decrease the vaccine's effectiveness. For instance, the flu, it mutates really rapidly.
So when you get a vaccine, it can protect for a long time.
INSKEEP: Let me just start by asking, can we hope for a time when the coronavirus is effectively gone from the world the way that polio and smallpox were all but eliminated?ĭOUCLEFF: So that works when the virus is very stable over time - right? - its genetic sequence doesn't mutate much, like the measles. MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. NPR global health correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff has been asking, what happens next? Michaeleen, good morning. But of course, that is just a projection, and it does not answer how the pandemic would completely end, if it ever does. We've reported on this program on projections that new cases may keep dropping all winter. Case levels are less than half what they were a couple of months ago. What is the end game for COVID? We seem to have made it past the worst of the delta surge.
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