The COVID-19 pandemic’s future is unknown, but the White House’s leading pandemic expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, predicts more COVID-19 variants.
“It’s hard to predict,” Fauci told BuzzFeed News. “But there will be new variations.”
More COVID-19 variations will lead to an increase in instances, which could occur throughout the year. Rising COVID-19 variations may cause “seasonal COVID,” when the virus re-emerges every few months.
“I think we will see ‘blips’ where there are more cases going forward as new variants emerge,” Fauci said.
Fauci told BuzzFeed News that variants will rise up in places where “you have large pockets of unvaccinated people that give the virus room to evolve.”
COVID-19 variants continue to come
COVID-19 variants continue to appear around the country. Some of them are not real variations, but rather COVID-19 subvariants. Many of the new subvariants appear to be related to the omicron variant, which caused extensive coronavirus cases in the winter of 2021-2022.
- The World Health Organization said Monday it is monitoring two new omicron subvariants — BA.4 and BA.5.
- At the same time, both the BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 variants — which are subvariants of the omicron’s first subvariant, BA.2 — created a recent surge in COVID-19 cases in New York, the New York State Department of Public Health said Wednesday.
- And then there’s the omicron XE variant, which brings together the BA.2 variant and the original omicron variant.
