Is the delta “super-variant” the last of the Coronavirus?

It's like weather forecast. We used to talk about the gamma variant here or about the alpha strain there, and now it's all just deltas,” told Guardian William Hannah, an epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health. TH Chan.

Since its first discovery in India in December 2020, the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has become so widespread that it could easily be assumed that the once rapid evolution of the virus has been replaced by a state of drowsiness.

According to the World Health Organization, 99.5 percent of all genome sequences of COVID-19 reported to public databases now refer to the species delta.

Although new variants continue to appear, such as AY 4.2, or the plus delta version in Great Britain, which scientists estimate is 10 to 15 percent more contagious, although there is still no accurate data, they are almost identical to the species of delta except for some small mutations.

“There's a lot of delta plus, but it's not obviously more contagious,” stresses Hannah.

But the reason that Hannah and his colleagues still scan databases such as Pangolin and Nextstrain every week is to try to predict what might come next. Is the delta really the end of COVID-19 or is something even worse approaching in the future? This is a question that no one is fully certain about.

One possibility is that after the initial dramatic jumps in its genetic sequence, which led to the alpha and then to the delta, the SARS-CoV-2 virus will now change more slowly and eventually go beyond the possibilities of actual vaccines, but only after many years.

While scientists try to point out that their predictions are based largely on speculation, some view this as the most likely outcome.

I predict that the evolution that we will see most is what we call antigenic shift, where the virus gradually evolves to save the immune system. For the flu and other coronarys that we know well, it takes about 10 years for the virus to have enough changes, so that the antibodies in the blood no longer recognize that”, said Francois Ballowux, director of the UCL Genetic Institute.

But the alternative is the sudden display of a completely new kind, with new and different transmissions possible, virulence or immuvability. Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at Cambridge University, calls these variants “upper-varitant” and says it's 80 percent sure that another one will appear, but the question is when.