As the world enters a new year, many public health and infectious disease experts predict that monitoring for new coronavirus variants will be an increasingly important part of COVID-19 mitigation efforts. 9News
Subvariants of the Omicron coronavirus variant continue to circulate globally, and "we're seeing Omicron do what viruses do, which is it picks up mutations along the way that helps it evade a little bit of immunity that's induced by previous infection or vaccination," said Andrew Pekosz, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
"SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is constantly changing and accumulating mutations in its genetic code over time. New variants of SARS-CoV-2 are expected to continue to emerge," CDC researchers write in their data tracker. "And that, of course, has led to the CDC's very recent announcement that they are going to oblige people who come to this country from China to be tested and test negative before they can come into the country."Travellers walk with their luggage at the arrival hall of the Hong Kong International Airport on December 30, 2022 in Hong Kong, China.
The Chinese government has not been sharing a lot of information about the genetic composition of the viruses that it's seeing there, Schaffner said.The Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 - also known as 2019-nCoV - is shown under a microscope. The virus causes COVID-19. In terms of the genetic data on coronaviruses in China that is accessible to the public, "It really is a bit of a black hole," Pekosz said.
Constant spread of a virus is what can lead to the emergence of variants. The more a virus spreads, the more it mutates. "Combine that with the fact that the Chinese population has been using less-than-optimal vaccines and has apparently not been as good about putting boosters into their population as other countries have, that means that there's probably a lower amount of immunity in the population."
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