The Red Queen Hypothesis is based upon the Lewis Carroll tale of Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Queen have a foot race and no matter has fast either go the remain in the same place. In genetics the argument is that biological entities must continually evolve, mutate, just to stay existent.
Now we see that COVID variants are continuing to arise. In Nature they note:
Here we go again. Nearly six months after researchers in South Africa identified the Omicron coronavirus variant, two offshoots of the game-changing lineage are once again driving a surge in COVID-19 cases there.
Several studies released in the past week show that the variants — known as BA.4 and BA.5 — are slightly more transmissible than earlier forms of Omicron, and can dodge some of the immune protection conferred by previous infection and vaccination...“We’re definitely entering a resurgence in South Africa, and it seems to be driven entirely by BA.4 and BA.5,” says Penny Moore, a virologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, whose team is studying the variants. “We’re seeing crazy numbers of infections. Just within my lab, I have six people off sick.” However, scientists say it is not yet clear whether BA.4 and BA.5 will cause much of a spike in hospitalizations in South Africa or elsewhere. High levels of population immunity — provided by previous waves of Omicron infection and by vaccination — might blunt much of the damage previously associated with new SARS-CoV-2 variants. Moreover, the rise of BA.4 and BA.5 — as well as that of another Omicron offshoot in North America — could mean that SARS-CoV-2 waves are beginning to settle into predictable patterns, with new waves periodically emerging from circulating strains (see ‘Omicron’s new identities’). “These are the first signs that the virus is evolving differently,” compared with the first two years of the pandemic when variants seemed to appear out of nowhere, says Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who led one of the studies.
So should we sorry? Is this unexpected? Not really. The virus is mutating as per the Red Queen Hypothesis so as to survive. Namely manage to maintain a host, namely us, while not destroying the host and finding itself out of luck.
We made this argument almost a year and half ago. Clearly our useless Government folks seem to be clueless as usual.
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