Early in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists predicted the SARS-CoV-2 virus would mutate slowly. They were wrong. Hundreds of thousands of viral mutations and multiple seasonal waves later, we now know why. The answer changes researchers' understanding of viral evolution — and it could help predict the evolution of other viruses in the future. Emily talks about it all with Sarah Zhang, a health writer for The Atlantic. Want to hear more virology or human biology stories? Let us know by emailing [email protected] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. So this month marks five years since officials at the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And we have come a long way since then. Researchers have figured out ways to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with masking and air filtering. They've developed safe treatments and vaccines.
And they've tracked hundreds of thousands of different mutations. And now we know something else, how those mutations evolved. Because if you remember, in March of 2020, a lot of scientists predicted that the coronavirus was not going to evolve very much.
It was thought that the coronavirus mutated pretty slowly, like half as fast as the flu or only a quarter as fast as HIV.
This is Sarah Zhang, a health writer for The Atlantic. Back in 2020, some scientists thought that once vaccines arrived, they would offer years of protection.
Unfortunately, I think we know what actually happened, which is that in the winter of 2020, we sort of got like this first big variant, what was known as Alpha. And then we just kept getting more and more variants.
Beta, Delta, Omicron. The coronavirus continued to mutate. to make these evolutionary jumps that helped it survive. And for a long time, scientists didn't know why. Sarah wrote a piece about this for The Atlantic last month, focusing on a series of studies that point to a relatively new idea that the virus could be incubating and mutating further in one specific group of people.
When the virus jumps from person to person, it gets about two mutations a month. But sometimes when the virus finds someone who maybe their immune system is a little bit suppressed, they aren't able to fight off the virus. Instead of, you know, being sick for like a week or two weeks, they might be sick for weeks or weeks on end or even months.
Meaning that in people who are immunocompromised, the virus may be able to stick around and evolve.
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