While it spread rather quickly than previous variants, leading to a surge in cases, it caused only mild infections. This is seen in the case of India, where XBB.1.16 displaced other variants to become the dominant one. It may be less seasonal than things we're used to," he added.īedford noted that some countries are seeing fresh surges in COVID about "three or four times each year, driven largely by the breakneck pace at which the virus continues to change."Ĭurrently, SARS-CoV-2's spike protein, in which most immunity-evading mutations occur, is evolving at twice the rate of a similar protein in seasonal influenza and about ten times as quickly as those of cold-causing 'seasonal' coronaviruses. "It will be a continually circulating respiratory disease. "We haven't slowed down in the last year, and I don't see what factors would cause it to do so at this point," Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, was quoted as saying.
"It seems increasingly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 will settle into a flu-like rhythm anytime soon," the scientists said.
#Current corona weather hourly series
However, a series of mini waves fueled by newer variants like XBB.1.16 are "different from the slower, annual circulation patterns of influenza and cold-causing coronaviruses". Scientists have long predicted that the COVID pandemic will end up in a seasonal spread pattern as influenza has. It will continue to cause mini-waves with mild infections, scientists contended in an article in the science journal Nature.
Even after three years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, has not yet become seasonal.
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