🖇 How Will the Coronavirus Evolve?

I’ve come to a point where I have accepted that Coronavirus will be with us for a while. I’m learning to live with it in my daily life. The real question on my mind is how Coronavirus is going to play out over the next few years?

How Will the Coronavirus Evolve? By Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is a practicing physician and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College.

These were the questions on my mind as I spoke with experts in an effort to understand the future of the pandemic. With questions so complex, it’s helpful to start by figuring out what, exactly, we want to know. For each new coronavirus variant, we want to find out if it’s more transmissible, if it will make us sicker, and if it will more effectively get around our immune defenses. On that last front, we want to understand two more questions: How much will it succeed in hiding from our antibodies (which recognize and bind to the virus, preventing infection) and from our T cells (which recognize chopped-up viral fragments displayed by infected cells, and specialize not in preventing infection but in controlling and terminating it).