ABOVE: Since its spillover into the human population in late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 has diversified into many clades and variants.
NEXTSTRAIN.ORG
A range of SARS-CoV-2 variants has emerged across the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Most attention has been on fast-spreading variants recently identified in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil. Scientists suspect that the variants’ particular patterns of mutations have the potential to affect their transmissibility, virulence, and/or ability to evade parts of the immune system. The latter could make people with vaccine-induced or natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 vulnerable to becoming reinfected with novel variants, and these possible effects remain under investigation.
There are a handful of other variants—typically with fewer eye-catching mutations—that researchers are also keeping a close watch on, notes molecular epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Bern in Switzerland. Making matters confusing, scientists can’t agree on a standardized naming system for new variants, causing what one ...
