Like many people who study the emergence of infectious diseases, Professor Holmes believes SARS-CoV-2 was an accident waiting to happen. But in the ye

We're three years into the COVID-19 pandemic. What might the virus do next?

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2023-01-30 22:30:09

Like many people who study the emergence of infectious diseases, Professor Holmes believes SARS-CoV-2 was an accident waiting to happen.

But in the years since he became one of the first people in the world to publicly share the SARS-CoV-2 genome, much of the way the virus has evolved has taken him by surprise.

"The level to which it's become more infectious is something that I would never have predicted," said Professor Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney.

Omicron, which emerged in late 2021, has since splintered into hundreds of subvariants — amounting to what's been described as a "variant soup" — and will likely keep splintering into more.

"The virus has still got the capacity to evolve and it will evolve … there's no evolutionary dead-end," Professor Holmes said.

"We'll definitely see more immune escape variants … but when, where and what they'll be is very hard to say."