Will covid be around 100 years from now?
The Covid-19 pandemic will end, but the virus that caused it — SARS-CoV-2 — isn't going away.
At this stage of the pandemic, it's unclear how the virus will affect humanity over the course of the coming decades. Part of the answer could lie in dozens of glass jars located in basements across Europe. These jars contain lung specimens from people who contracted influenza during the early 20th century.
"The subsequent seasonal flu virus that went on circulating after the [1918] pandemic might well have directly evolved from the pandemic virus," study co-author Living through a respiratory pandemic more than a century ago was a very different experience from what people alive today have seen during Covid-19. As many asacross the world died, but researchers barely understood what was going on.
Very few samples from the pandemic have survived, and only a fraction of them have been preserved well enough to enable researchers to look closely at the remnants of the virus's genetic code. However, new methods are giving researchers the power to learn from samples that couldn't be used just a few years ago.Researchers already had complete genomes from the viruses that killed two people in 1919. One of them died in New York and the other died in Alaska.
Does that prove that SARS-CoV-2 will join the other coronaviruses and circulate through the human population for the next 100 years? There's no guarantee, but this research shows that something like that scenario has probably happened before.Stay ahead with the latest science, technology and innovation news, for free:
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