Nature. Meanwhile, experts are still trying to understand Omicron’s relative mildness. It is still under discussion whether the mildness is due to the prevalence of immunity against SARS-CoV-2, rather than intrinsic properties of the virus itself.
Moreover, as more and more people get vaccinated against COVID, yet is yet to be understood how new variants will affect us.
On another quivering question that is when the next variant will arrive, the study suggests there is no way to know for sure when a variant will become dominant, or whether it will rise to the status of a ‘variant of concern’.
Andrew Page, bioinformatician at the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, told Nature, the history of these viral dynamics suggests that a new variant will sweep through every few months. “They seem to happen quite regularly," he says. “It’s probably just going to tick along." But whether that variant will rise to the level of a variant of concern remains an open question.