An infectious disease expert cautions that a coronavirus variant could emerge with the transmissibility of Omicron and the deadliness of the original SARS.
As SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has spread throughout the world, many observers have failed to take note of the millions of illnesses and deaths caused by HIV—another virus that has approached pandemic status during its history. Now an HIV variant that is more virulent and transmissible has been discovered in the Netherlands, where it apparently has been circulating for decades, according to new research.
William A. Haseltine, an infectious disease researcher who founded Harvard University’s cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments and now chairs the think tank ACCESS Health International, has written extensively about the potential of SARS-CoV-2 assume a more dangerous form.
With HIV, [its evolution has] been a long, drawn-out process because the virus is poorly transmissible. It takes, on average, 100 sexual contacts for a man to give it to a woman and 200 contacts for a woman to give it to a man. The process is a slower-evolving one—not because the virus doesn’t change but because the replication cycles can be quite long. For Omicron, those cycles can take hours or days at the most.
First of all, the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 has been very stable—with the exception of Delta, which is twice as likely to land you in the hospital. Delta was a warning shot across our bow, showing the virus can become both more transmissible and more virulent. There is nothing that we know of that restrains this virus from becoming as lethal as its cousin SARS-CoV-1. We still have no clue whether one genetic change or many make SARS-CoV-1 so much more virulent than SARS-CoV-2.
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