The last strain?
Every week, a group of epidemiologists across the north-east of the US joins a Zoom call to discussing the latest hints of new Covid-19 variants being reported around the world. “It’s like the weather report,” says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “It used to be, ‘We have a little bit of Gamma there, we’ve got Alpha coming up here.’ But now it’s just Delta.”
Since it was first detected in India in December 2020, the Delta variant of S ars-CoV-2 has become so ubiquitous that it would be easy to assume that the once-rapid evolution of the virus has been replaced by a state of quiescence. According to the World Health Organization, 99.5% of all Covid-19 genomic sequences reported to public databases are now Delta.
While new strains have continued to
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