After 2 years of the COVID pandemic… we nonetheless have huge questions

In December 2019, a gaggle of individuals in Wuhan, China, started to expertise what was described as an unknown pneumonia, later recognized as COVID-19, which rapidly blanketed the globe. To this point, there have been 280 million infections up to now, leading to 5.4 million deaths.

Since then, advances in opposition to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have come quickly: A number of efficient vaccines emerged in a single yr, far quicker than the everyday 4 to 10 years of growth. And Pfizer has simply obtained FDA authorization for its COVID antiviral drug Paxlovid, which the prescription drugs big says may lower the chance of hospitalization or dying from COVID-19 by as much as 89%.

Infectious illness consultants have found a lot concerning the science of COVID-19 and may now rapidly establish mutations, like these discovered within the delta and omicron variants. 

Nevertheless, two years on, because the US passes 800,000 deaths from COVID — and tens of hundreds of thousands extra infections and hospitalizations — scientists are nonetheless struggling to reply a few of our largest questions. For extra info on COVID-19, here is what we all know concerning the new omicron variant and how one can get free at-home testing kits. And you’ll want to learn to put your vaccine card in your telephone.

Why does COVID make some individuals extra sick, together with lengthy COVID?

We all know the virus causes signs starting from complications, fever and disorientation to nausea and vomiting, and even lack of style or odor. Whereas scientists proceed to piece collectively who’s extra prone to get hit with these outcomes, they nonetheless lack solutions about why some expertise severe sickness and others do not. 

Age is certainly the largest correlation for extreme illness, Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar on the Johns Hopkins Middle for Well being Safety, informed CNET. “However there have been 29-year-olds who’ve died, youngsters who’ve died, when all indications recommend they need to have had a gentle illness course.” 

Scientists are additionally making an attempt to get their arms round “lengthy COVID” — a variety of signs that may run on for weeks and even months after a affected person is first contaminated. The World Well being Group has issued a definition that features quite a lot of lingering signs — together with fatigue, hassle respiratory, sleeplessness, problem focusing, nervousness and despair — and the checklist retains altering. Even so, the situation’s trigger just isn’t clearly recognized. 

“After two years, we do not perceive a lot about lengthy COVID, and do not know its prevalence with omicron after vaccination,” Bob Wachter, the chair of the division of medication on the College of California, San Francisco, tweeted Wednesday. “It stays a hardship for hundreds of thousands, and a lingering concern for me as I take into consideration the prospect of getting even a ‘gentle’ case of omicron.”

Whereas some normal signs, like lack of odor and style, seem much less widespread with omicron, Gronvall mentioned, “we simply do not know if individuals with that variant will undergo lengthy COVID. We simply have not had sufficient time to inform.”

How lengthy will immunity from vaccines final with variants like omicron?

The primary COVID-19 vaccines went into arms a yr in the past within the US, and the 2 simplest within the US — from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech — took a novel strategy: Utilizing Messenger RNA (mRNA) to show our cells how one can make a protein that can set off an immune response to the virus. 

Whereas researchers have been learning mRNA vaccines “for many years,” in accordance to the CDC, this marks the primary time they have been made out there to the general public. Scientists proceed to collect info on how efficient they’re — and the way lengthy till their effectiveness begins to say no.

“We’re undoubtedly nonetheless figuring that out,” Gronvall mentioned. “We’re seeing that safety wanes sooner than six months, which is why boosters are being advisable at six months.”

As new variants just like the quick-spreading omicron emerge, she added, “whether or not the booster will probably be adequate for a protracted time frame or not is one thing we nonetheless must uncover.”

In accordance to the World Well being Group, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are far much less efficient in stopping an infection by the omicron pressure than earlier COVID-19 variants. Different vaccines — together with these from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and ones manufactured in Russia and China — do even much less to forestall an infection by the omicron variant, The New York Occasions reported.

Nonetheless, totally vaccinated people are a lot much less prone to expertise extreme signs, hospitalization and dying, in response to Harvard Medical Faculty, particularly in the event that they obtain a booster shot.

“It is not a worst-case situation, the place the vaccines are ineffective,” Gronvall mentioned. “In lab eventualities we have seen, vaccines present much less safety. That appears to be borne out in actuality, however we won’t mission but into the true world.”

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Will there be more variants like delta and omicron?

Viruses constantly mutate. Sometimes these mutations result in new disease strains that emerge quickly and disappear, according to the CDC. Other times, they persist and create spikes in the rate of infection and disease. In two years, COVID has mutated into five “variants of concern,” according to WHO, based on the severity of disease, the effectiveness of medical countermeasures and the strain’s ability to spread from person to person.

The alpha, beta and gamma variants were all downgraded to “variants being monitored” in September, with delta and omicron still considered variants of concern. This week federal health officials declared the omicron variant the dominant strain in the US, accounting for nearly three-quarters of new infections. Preliminary studies indicate illness caused by omicron may be less severe than delta, which doubled the hospitalization rate of the original alpha strain, but is also far more contagious. 

Health officials warn that the longer the pandemic lasts and the longer large groups remain unvaccinated, the more time the virus will have to spread and mutate. While researchers can quickly map and identify variants, they need time to see how dangerous a new strain is as they gather data on hospitalizations and deaths.

“We’re still not great at looking at new variants and projecting what that means in the real world,” Gronvall said. “We have better tools to read genetic material and determine when variants emerge. But we can’t read them like a book.”

Where did COVID-19 come from?

Experts are still not certain how COVID-19 emerged. The prevailing theory is that it leaped from an animal to a human. The first symptoms of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan among people who either worked or lived near Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an open-air “wet market” that sold fresh beef, poultry, fish and produce. 

According to numerous sources, including a June 2021 study in Scientific Reports, the market also traded in exotic animals as pets and food, including badgers, hedgehogs, civets and porcupines. 

Others, however, claim that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in a lab — with a naturally occurring or human-engineered virus infecting a researcher, who spread it to others. While there has been no solid evidence to back the lab-leak theory, former President Donald Trump and his supporters pushed the lab-origin theory through 2020. 

“There’s a lot of people using this as a vehicle for other agendas,” Gronvall said. “And certainly the Chinese have been lying.” Government officials originally claimed that there were no contraband animals present at the market, she added, but researchers looking for a separate tick-borne disease photographed many illegal animals there, “stuffed together in close quarters, in poor health and stress conditions, in the months before cases were identified.”

“People are looking to blame [someone],” Gronvall mentioned. “They don’t seem to be searching for a proof that could be very human and believable. However there is no virus that is been recognized within the laboratory that is in any respect near what ended up spreading all over the world.”

As a result of the Chinese language authorities shut down the Huanan market and eliminated all proof nearly as quickly as instances of COVID have been being related to it, Gronvall mentioned, researchers should not prone to ever discover the precise animal offender.

“It wasn’t like SARS in 2003, once you had these palm civets there that have been all contaminated and it was a reasonably fast factor,” she mentioned.

To uncover extra concerning the emergence of COVID-19, this summer season, President Joe Biden directed the federal intelligence neighborhood to “redouble their efforts” to research the virus’ origins.

What we do know, heading into the third yr of the illness, is we’ve a medication cupboard of instruments — together with vaccines and antiviral capsules — we did not have once we first realized of COVID-19. For extra, here is what we all know concerning the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine boosters and how one can decide which one to get.

The data contained on this article is for instructional and informational functions solely and isn’t supposed as well being or medical recommendation. At all times seek the advice of a doctor or different certified well being supplier relating to any questions you will have a few medical situation or well being goals.