Chronic COVID Infections Could be Causing New Variants

June 15, 2022

Nature magazine addresses what scientists are discovering about the evolutionary battle COVID is causing inside our bodies. Throughout the course of a chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus might be evolving into dangerous new variants. “Each person’s infection is its own universe, where new mutations arise as the infection spreads from cell to cell. Most of these changes won’t matter to the virus, and many will do it harm. But some might give it a slight advantage over other versions of the virus in that person’s body, enhancing its ability to spread or providing some resistance to immune defenses. These two traits — infectivity and immune evasion — are the main ways in which SARS-CoV-2 has evolved since it first emerged in 2019.”