I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year meeting with colleagues at our foundation and around the world about ways to test for, treat, and prevent COVID-19. In recent months, the experts in those meetings are increasingly asking the same question: How will new variants impact our efforts to end the pandemic?The world has come a long way in the fight against COVID-19, but new variants of the virus could threaten progress we’ve made over the past year. Here are five things you should know if you want to understand how variants are (and aren’t) complicating the pandemic.1. If you’ve ever gotten a flu shot, you’ve already dealt with a virus variant.Viruses evolve all the time. Unless you work on infectious diseases, the idea of a “variant” might seem new and scary—but there’s nothing particularly unusual about them. Influenza’s ability to mutate quickly (I’ll talk more about this in the next section) is why we get a new flu shot every year. We need to update the vaccine annually to keep up with constantly shifting flu virus strains.To understand why the virus that causes COVID-19 is changing, you need to understand how it works (or spreads) in your body. The coronavirus—like all viruses—has only one goal: to replicate itself. Every time the virus invades your cells, it tricks the cell into following the instructions encoded in its RNA to make more copies of the virus.
Source: 5 things you should know about variants | Bill Gates
