Can new variants of the coronavirus keep emerging?
ABC News
The coronavirus that caused the pandemic can keep evolving as long as people are still getting infected, but that doesn’t mean new variants will emerge as regularly or that they’ll be more dangerous
WASHINGTON -- Can new variants of the coronavirus keep emerging?
Yes, as long as the virus that caused the pandemic keeps infecting people. But that doesn’t mean new variants will keep emerging as regularly, or that they’ll be more dangerous.
With more than half the world still not vaccinated, the virus will likely keep finding people to infect and replicating inside them for several months or years to come. And each time a virus makes a copy of itself, a small mutation could occur. Those changes could help the virus survive, becoming new variants.
But that doesn’t mean the virus will keep evolving in the same way since it emerged in late 2019.
