Kai KupferschmidtEach dot above represents a virus isolated from a COVID-19 patient in this family tree of SARS-CoV-2, which shows a tiny subset of the more than 2 million viruses sequenced so far.
The World Health Organization currently recognizes four variants of concern and four variants of interest.Edward Holmes does not like making predictions, but last year he hazarded a few.
Again and again, people had asked Holmes, an expert on viral evolution at the University of Sydney, how he expected SARS-CoV-2 to change.
In May 2020, 5 months into the pandemic, he started to include a slide with his best guesses in his talks. The virus would probably evolve to avoid at least some human immunity, he suggested.