Will COVID variants keep getting worse?

Will a variant worse than Delta emerge?

“That’s what keeps me up at night,” Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease ecologist at Georgetown University, told The Atlantic. The longer the virus is allowed to spread in unvaccinated populations, the greater the chance of it mutating when jumping from host to host. The big concern is that a new variant will be able to evade the vaccines, and everyone — regardless of their vaccination status — will be vulnerable to the virus once again. We’ve already seen the virus change several times in the less than two years since COVID-19 emerged. But while scientists are surprised by COVID-19’s rapid mutations, there are evolutionary pressures on how viruses change. When an organism evolves to become more fit in one way, it often sheds a different trait at the same time. For example, a virus might mutate to become more contagious, but at the expense of its own severity. Such evolutionary trade-offs help keep many viruses in check. “There isn’t a super-ultimate virus that has every bad combination of mutations,” Dr. Aris Katzourakis, who studies viral evolution at the University of Oxford, told BBC.