"Corona killer variant" possible?
Expert with Covid forecast: "Lockdowns should no longer be necessary"
Created: 05/11/2022, 16:24
Anyone who has been boosted and has gone through a corona infection has the best possible protection against contracting Covid 19 again.
© Sven Hoppe/dpa
In year three of the corona pandemic, life for many people feels largely normal again.
Will Corona now become part of our everyday life?
Berlin – Corona has lost its terror for many people in the past few months.
With the appearance of the omicron variant at the end of last year, the virus spread at a previously unknown speed and infected millions of people in Germany within a few weeks.
However, most of them fell ill - if at all - only comparatively easily, also thanks to the vaccinations.
So is the state of emergency of the past few years over?
One hope that is often expressed is
that the pandemic will become endemic
.
This term, which is often used somewhat imprecisely, describes a state in which the waves of infection flatten out and the effects of the infection process are therefore less serious, at least for a large part of the population.
According to Friedemann Weber from the Justus Liebig University in Gießen, when it comes to the question of the endemic, it depends on whether you mean the disease Covid-19 or the Sars-CoV-2 virus.
Endemic does not automatically mean good
An endemic state would be reached when there was no longer a strong accumulation of infections or diseases.
"In the case of Covid-19, this could soon be the case, because immunity - acquired through vaccination and infection - protects against it quite well," says Weber.
"In the case of the virus, however, new variants are constantly being introduced, causing a rapid increase in the number of cases." Basically, endemic does not automatically mean good.
Because of course people can still get sick and die from Covid-19.
How things will continue in the coming months, how much the virus will concern us, depends, among other things, on how strong the immunity of the population is now.
In other words, how many people have built up protection against further infection and/or illness
via a previous infection or vaccination
.
A model recently presented by scientists at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) provides indications of the extent of immunity.
According to this study, only seven percent of the people in Germany are
immunologically naive
- i.e. neither vaccinated nor come into contact with the corona virus through infection.
In general, the larger the proportion of this group, the easier it is for the virus to spread.
At seven percent, the chances of the virus spreading should already be considerably limited
- even if it is not certain how well protected the other 93 percent are from further infection and illness.
Children under the age of 5 often not yet immunized against Corona
However, the RKI researchers point out that the immunity achieved varies greatly from state to state, mostly due to the different vaccination rates.
The figures determined also varied greatly in the age groups: In the case of older people over the age of 60 with a higher risk of a severe course of the disease, the scientists assume that around four percent are immunologically naïve.
Among the children, however, the number of those who had no immunity was greater - after all, there is still no Covid 19 vaccine
for children under the age of 5, and only a limited vaccination recommendation for children aged 5 to 11.
How the situation will develop in the coming months also depends to a large extent on the further development of the virus.
And that is difficult to predict
.
"Other viruses, such as influenza viruses, change more gradually and less erratically than Sars-CoV-2 in the past two years," says Richard Neher, who researches the evolution of viruses at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel.
"It is conceivable that Sars-CoV-2 will change more gradually and less dramatically in the future." It is unclear whether and when this change will come.
Most experts consider the emergence of a “
killer variant
” as suggested by Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach to be rather improbable.
But even without an extremely immune-resistant and disease-causing variant, it has not been finally clarified how good - and how long-lasting - the immune protection achieved so far is in the population.
Booster vaccination plus infection protects best
Experts assume that it generally increases with the number of contacts that create immunity - i.e. with the number of vaccinations or infections that have been passed.
Fully vaccinated with a booster and at best a previous infection would therefore be best protected against serious illness.
Unvaccinated people who have only been infected with omicron in the past few months may not be better off next fall than completely immune-naive people.
Especially if your infection was only mild, some experts believe that the immune system may not have built up sufficient immune protection in the long term.
more on the subject
Many vaccinated and recovered: is the corona stress over?
Protection against all variants: super vaccine wanted
More than 25 million registered corona cases
"
If omicron-like variants still predominate in our country next autumn/winter, we can probably cope well with the number of immune-naive people,
" says immunologist Carsten Watzl, Secretary General of the German Society for Immunology.
"If Delta-derived variants predominate, the group of immune-naïve is larger, and that could still pose problems."
Virus evolution researcher Neher from Basel notes as an advantage that the immunity landscape in the population is becoming more and more diverse, since people have different vaccination and infection histories.
"As diversity increases, variants that bypass the immunity of the majority of the population become
less likely
."
Against this background, can one assume that overloading the healthcare system and intensive care units is a thing of the past?
"As far as Covid is concerned, in my opinion yes, even with a new variant with a pronounced immune escape," says Christian Karagiannidis, scientific director of the Divi intensive care register.
"
We would have had a lot of bad luck there.
However, the burdens on the healthcare system are made up of the existing capacities and all the sick people - "we have to expect a clear wave of respiratory diseases in autumn/winter, such as the flu".
It is extremely difficult to predict whether the measures will have to be tightened again in autumn, says Hajo Zeeb from the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology in Bremen.
"
Very tough measures such as lockdowns should no longer be necessary
, especially if further boosting takes place over the summer."
dpa
