Top Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli has said the pathogen will continue to mutate and the world must prepare to coexist with it.
“As the number of infected cases has just become too big, this allowed the novel coronavirus more opportunities to mutate and select. New variants will continue to emerge,” Shi said.
Head of the centre for emerging infectious diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi has become the subject of intense speculation including a conspiracy theory that the Covid-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab.
Popuarly attributed as “bat woman”, Shi’s research focuses on the origin of novel coronaviruses. She published a paper last year that the Chinese horseshoe bat was the natural host for Sars-related coronaviruses.
As the coronavirus continues to rage around the world, genetic variants have emerged and circulated.
The Delta variant was first identified in India in October and is the most infectious strain, spreading more aggressively than previous strains due to its higher viral load. It has caused a surge of cases across the globe, including in China where many cities are mass testing the population to curb its transmission.
According to the World Health Organization, at least 135 countries have reported cases of the Delta variant.
Meanwhile, Shi called on the scientific community to speed up with the development of new vaccines and medications to prevent upper respiratory infection against the virus.
US intelligence agencies are digging through a treasure trove of genetic data that could be key to uncovering the origins of the coronavirus — as soon as they can decipher it. This giant catalog of information contains genetic blueprints drawn from virus samples studied at the lab in Wuhan, China which some officials believe may have been the source of the Covid-19 outbreak, multiple people familiar with the matter told CNN.
It’s unclear exactly how or when US intelligence agencies gained access to the information, but the machines involved in creating and processing this kind of genetic data from viruses are typically connected to external cloud-based servers — leaving open the possibility they were hacked, sources informed CNN.
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