As several world countries have started vaccination drive, the race against coronavirus has taken a new turn. As mutations are rapidly popping up, the number of cases in several countries is increasing drastically. In the meantime, the vaccination process is taking more time than previous expectations, and it has made several medical experts believe that new variants can elude current vaccines and treatments.
Increasingly, scientists are grappling to identify more and more potentially worrying variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, with just what to call them. Since experts want to avoid naming after a country or region; some scientists want to do away with names that flag individual mutations.
At a recent World Health Organization meeting, health officials and researchers started hashing out a new naming system, but failed to settle on one. "The nomenclature is a bloody mess at the moment," said bioinformatician Tulio de Oliveira.
After the perfect storm remark, Fauci says things are still serious
It was during the summer peak of the coronavirus outbreak that top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci called COVID-19 ''a perfect storm with no end in near sight''. As new mutant variants of coronavirus have started infecting people, medical experts believe that the words of Fauci have turned true.
And now, Fauci has revealed that things should be taken seriously, considering the current rise in coronavirus positive cases.
Harvard University's Dr. Michael Mina also shared similar views and suggested that the only way to prevent the rise in coronavirus mutant variants is by slowing down the transmission.
"We need to do everything we can now, to get transmission as low as we possibly can. The best way to prevent mutant strains from emerging is to slow transmission," said Mina, Associated Press reports.
Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, revealed that humanity is raising against time now, as a deadly mutation of coronavirus could turn things worse.
Coronavirus choking world countries
Even though countries like India are now showing signs of flattening the COVID-19 curve, the United States still continues to top the chaos chart with rising number of cases. On January 18, more than 1,42,000 coronavirus positive cases were reported in the country.
According to the latest statistics, there are more than 24 million coronavirus positive cases in the US, and the death toll has already crossed 4,08,000.
Coronavirus positive cases are also drastically increasing in countries like the United States and Russia. Even amid nationwide lockdown, the United Kingdom witnessed more than 37,000 positive cases on January 18. The total number of deaths in the United Kingdom is nearing 90,000, and considering the rise in positive cases, the mortality rate in the country is expected to increase in the coming weeks.
