How the Coronavirus Stays One Step Ahead of Us
At first, no one looked twice at the new variant. Detected in South Africa in January 2021, the novel coronavirus lineage, called C.1, appeared similar to other variants. It wasn’t spreading much, and there was nothing unexpected about its genome.
But viruses evolve fast. Exceptionally fast. Faster than any other organism on Earth—and the new coronavirus is no exception. Ed Feil, a professor at the University of Bath, studies the evolution of pathogens and recently analyzed the coronavirus’s mutation rate. “SARS-CoV-2 has experienced roughly the same amount of mutational evolutionary change during the pandemic (proportional to genome size), as humans have since Homo habilis first walked the Earth about 2.5 million years ago,” Feil explained in The Conversation.
It’s no surprise that just four months later, when South Africa was suffering through a third wave of COVID-19 caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant, a team tracking the virus began detecting a new version of C.1 with extensive changes in its genome. They soon discovered that the variant, dubbed C.1.2, is more mutated than any other major variant sweeping the world. It contains all the key changes found in Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, as well as additional worrisome changes currently under investigation, including some associated with an ability to evade the immune system.1
The question of whether anything else happens in the evolution of this virus is moot. It will.
“This version has so many more mutations,” says computational biologist Cathrine Scheepers at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, who was part of the team that spotted C.1.2 in May 2021. For now, thankfully, the new variant remains at low levels compared to Delta, says Scheepers, but it has been detected in 10 additional countries. “We’re still monitoring it,” Scheepers adds.
As a science journalist entrenched in daily COVID-19 news, I’ve recently noticed some public health officials forecasting Delta as the last major wave of the pandemic. They tend to
