This is Dr Klotman’s Week 170 COVID update. Pandemic activity is fairly quiet. The vast majority of COVID cases are now caused by subvariants of the SARS-CoV-2 XBB viral lineage.
It seems to me that we have arrived at a low energy state in the virus’s evolution. By this I mean that evolution of the virus to a more virulent or contagious form would seem to take multiple, unlikely events. That doesn’t mean that it won’t happen rather that unless the virus passes to other hosts where it can mutate further, we aren’t likely to see it gain in its capacity to make us deathly ill or spread rampantly as it did when it was truly a novel pathogen.
The FDA group that works to identify the viral strains that should be included in our vaccines is properly focused on the XBB lineage. With our new ability to produce m-RNA vaccines rapidly, the FDA will probably wait until the last moment to select the COVID virus strains most likely to provide a good immune response.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that COVID will fade further in the coming Fall.