COVID-19: World has a long battle ahead, thanks to mutations

Relatives of a 67-year-old man, who died of COVID-19, pray during a funeral at the Brookwood Cemetery, Woking, on Saturday. PIC/AFP

In roughly 40 days, the world will enter the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, declared on March 11, 2020, prompting countries to massively restrict movement and shut down businesses. While some eased their restrictions over time, others recently reinforced them, thanks to new, highly contagious mutated variants of novel Coronavirus.

Even though the world has vaccines against COVID-19 now, several research studies have found them to be not that effective against the new strains. This has worried scientists, who have reiterated their note of caution: The pandemic is a long way from over.

"We're very worried. All it's going to take is a couple more mutations on top of that, and you're really going to have to start worrying," the Washington Post quoted Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, as saying.

Collins, citing information from the trials of biotech firm Novavax, said that there were concerns of reinfection with the new strain - B.1.351 - found in South Africa. Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine was found to be 66 per cent effective overall, but 57 per cent against B.1.351 in the African nation.

"That is something I had not seen before. It is very tentative, and the numbers are not huge, but I would be alarmed if natural infection... is not sufficient to provide immunity," Collins said of the reinfection.

Some scientists said that mutations will make novel Coronavirus weaker over time. "It can't keep mutating because it's going to lose the properties of being an all-around transmissible and pathogenic virus," the WSJ quoted Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa, as saying.

"We will not be for decades dealing with a pandemic," said epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health. "The concern is whether it will be a year or three years until we can make enough vaccines against enough strains to get this under control."

Collins said the best that people can do is to "continue to be irresponsible" and follow all the measures against the spread of the virus. And countries need to vaccinate as many people as possible before the mutations reach a point where vaccines become infective. Then "we'd have to redesign a completely new vaccine all over again."

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