COVID Virus Continues to Evolve at a Fast Pace

Wednesday, October 26th, 2022 -- 11:01 AM

(By Rob Stein, Wisconsin Public Radio) Throughout the pandemic, the virus that causes COVID-19 has been evolving fast, blindsiding the world with one variant after another.

According to Rob Stein with Wisconsin Public Radio, the World Health Organization hasn't given a SARS-CoV-2 variant a Greek name in almost a year, a move that's reserved for new variants that do or could have significant public health impacts, such as being more transmissible or causing more severe disease.

That raises the question: Has the evolution of the virus finally started to ebb, possibly making it more predictable? The answer, according to a dozen evolutionary biologists, virologists and immunologists interviewed by NPR, is no.

"SARS-CoV-2 is continuing to evolve extremely rapidly," says Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist who studies the evolution of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. "There's no evidence that the evolution is slowing down."

Instead, the most consequential evolutionary changes have stayed confined to the omicron family, rather than appearing in entirely new variants. Whereas alpha, beta, gamma and the other named variants sprouted new branches on the SARS-CoV-2 family tree, those limbs were dwarfed by the omicron bough, which is now studded with a plethora of subvariant stems.

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.