If variants are spawned as a function of total cases, shouldn’t we worry that the billions of infections this winter will spawn a dozen new variants that all sweep the globe at the same time and possibly kill everyone?
Not necessarily. In many ways variants seem to evolve much more deterministically than one might think, and there’s good reason to hope that we might ultimately exhaust the repertoire of viable combinations of mutations.
That doesn’t sound like less then 20 percent probability! Just in case, we could close all borders just ahead of the billions-of-infections peak for a month to check whether the omnicronomicon opens; then at least each country might only get swept by its own variant.
If variants are spawned as a function of total cases, shouldn’t we worry that the billions of infections this winter will spawn a dozen new variants that all sweep the globe at the same time and possibly kill everyone?
Not necessarily. In many ways variants seem to evolve much more deterministically than one might think, and there’s good reason to hope that we might ultimately exhaust the repertoire of viable combinations of mutations.
That doesn’t sound like less then 20 percent probability! Just in case, we could close all borders just ahead of the billions-of-infections peak for a month to check whether the omnicronomicon opens; then at least each country might only get swept by its own variant.