\u0027The world is discovering SARS\u002DCoV\u002D2 isn’t behaving with neat, predictable, winter\u002Dbound waves like the flu, but with multiple rollers that are coming faster\u0027
“As much as all of us would love the pandemic to be over we are seeing changes in the virus that continue to make this extremely challenging,” said Dr. Fahad Razak, an internist at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital and the new scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory table.
Dr. Catherine Hankins doesn’t want to anthropomorphize SARS-CoV-2, assign it human emotions or behaviour. It doesn’t have a brain, though it sometimes behaves as if it does. But it is making the most of our hunger, and the pressure, socially and economically, “to get out and return to a fuller life,” she said. The more transmission, the more opportunity for the virus to mutate and lob new variants at us like hammer throws.
“People were saying this will be like a seasonal respiratory virus. ‘We’ll have a great summer and in the fall it will come back.’ It’s not acting like that. It has these cyclical waves. We’re now in July!” said Hankins, co-chair of Canada’s COVID-19 immunity task force and a professor of public and population health at McGill University.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Unlike early in the pandemic, when no one was immune, “the virus is mutating in populations that have a fair amount of resistance to earlier forms,” Snutch said. The mutations that are arising now are only advantageous to the virus if they can skirt our existing immune responses: infect people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, and replicate inside them.Article content