More news appears granting us hope that the ongoing COVID pandemic is approaching its end. What’s for sure is that nobody wants it around, and a lot of medical researchers and doctors are doing their best to get rid of it.
Dame Sarah Gilbert, whose work led to the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID, said that the coronavirus doesn’t have many options left when it comes to evading immunity, according to LiveMint.com.
The coronavirus cannot completely mutate
The scientist declared, as quoted by LiveMint.com:
The virus cannot completely mutate because its spike protein has to interact with the ACE2 receptor on the surface of the human cell, in order to get inside it.
She also added, as cited by the same source:
If it changes its spike protein so much that it can’t interact with that receptor, then it’s not going to be able to get inside the cell. So, there aren’t many places for the virus to go to have something that will evade immunity but still remain infectious.
Now for the really great news. Sarah Gilbert suggests that COVID can become just a common cold, as quoted by LiveMint.com:
We already live with four different human coronaviruses that we don’t really ever think about very much and eventually SARS-CoV-2 will become one of them.
As for now, the world still has a lot to struggle with COVID if we just take a look at the data brought by worldometers.info. The pandemic continues to hardly hit the US, the country that reports over 100,000 infections per day. Furthermore, a total of over 700,000 people died in the country because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Delta variant is now dominating, and it will continue so for plenty of time, unfortunately.