On video: Protest against the corona restrictions in Shanghai, China (Reuters)
Is the next version of the corona expected to be more severe than the mild strains that are currently dominant in the world?
The answer to this according to a new study is - yes.
The ultra-contagious omicron strain appeared almost a year ago, and its mutations reached almost every country in the world and took first place there.
True, this is a much milder variant than the older versions of the virus, and many researchers believed that the omicron represented the end of the evolution of the corona, which, like many viruses before it, had mutated and become lighter, so that it could spread more easily.
But researchers in South Africa say the virus still has the potential to be more deadly, after conducting studies on an immunosuppressed HIV patient who had the virus in his body for six months.
The studied patient is one of those who suffer from the most common type of omicron, which itself apparently developed in a person with a very weakened immune system.
The findings after examining the patient showed that over time, the virus evolved and caused more cell death, which led to increased inflammation in the lungs.
These effects are more similar to those of the first corona strain than the micron strain, according to Professor Alex Siegel, the virologist who led the study.
The virus evolved and caused more cell death.
GIF of Corona (Photo: Giphy, KAUST; Ivan Viola)
Immunocompromised people have a harder time getting rid of the virus, allowing it to continuously replicate and mutate in their bodies over time, before spreading its new mutations to others.
Still, the findings from South Africa represent only one theory about the future spread of Corona, and some believe that the protection achieved through vaccination and previous infection puts the world in a stronger position to deal with it.
The finding comes against the backdrop of warnings that the severe corona outbreak in China could give rise to a "doomsday" version that has the potential to return the world to the starting point in the fight against the virus.
The 'zero infection' policy used in China brought the economic hardship and the residents back into isolation and also caused protests in the country.
Corona cases doubled within two weeks across the country, where the epidemic began almost three years ago.
A record 40,000 people are now testing positive every day, with tens of millions under severe restrictions.
The situation in China proves what the researchers claim.
Demonstrations in China (Photo: Reuters)
The latest study was carried out by researchers from the African Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, which was the first laboratory to test the original Omicron against the older vaccines and showed that the strain significantly weakened their effects.
The researchers tested normal blood samples of a corona patient who was infected with Omicron and had it for six months.
They sequenced viral samples from his blood shortly after he was diagnosed with corona, then during the first month of diagnosis, and then at three-month intervals.
They studied changes in the genetic makeup of the virus, as well as how infected human cells behaved.
As time passed from the first diagnoses, cell death became more common.
When the patient was first infected with Omicron, about four percent of the infected human cells died.
That was about a third of the level of the Wuhan strain — which first appeared in late 2019, which killed about 12 percent of infected cells.
On the sixth day after diagnosis, less than six percent of the cells were identified as dead.
On the 20th, that rate rose to nearly seven percent.
The frequency of cell death, which represented how the severity of the disease changed, rose again to nearly 10 percent at day 190, about the same rate as the original Wuhan strain.
"It's not simple because the early virus was weakened. However, according to parameters we measured, it became less weakened, which shows that long-term evolution does not always lead to weakening. Therefore, the next major version, if it comes, will not necessarily be as light as Omicron" , the researchers wrote.
The finding came as a shock to them, as they assumed, like Rerabs, that corona strains would become less lethal and contagious over time, judging by the relative ease of Omicron compared to previous versions.
"We are still in the middle of the corona"
The team's findings do not bode well for the global response to the ongoing public health problem.
But the latest publication -- which has yet to be peer-reviewed by other scientists -- came with several problems, chief among them being that it relied on testing only a single patient.
A much larger sample size is needed to reach a conclusion about the evolutionary course of the virus.
The study, published last week, does not indicate that there is a need to return to comprehensive reduction measures such as mandatory masks, but it does reinforce the government's warnings that the epidemic remains a major public health problem.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government's top infectious disease expert and President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, said earlier this week that the US is "definitely" still in the midst of a corona epidemic and made it clear that it is not over.
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