OMICRON: SENDING US A MESSAGE LOUD AND CLEAR?
It's been really long since I've posted here, as I've been busy with my committee, Youth Leaders in Medicine - Bangalore chapter, boards and ah I'm finally back. I'm back again to quench your scientific thirst with yet another amusing topic for today!
Uncertainty clouds everything and Omicron adds on! The current data on Omicron is still insufficient to make clear assumptions on the exact nature of this new variant, but some things are pretty much clear about this new strain to analyse and understand its essential meaning. This new strain is sending out a message, loud and clear - this virus is capable of far more variations than what was thought possible and it will keep coming back to haunt us again and again.
If we see from an evolutionary perspective, Omicron was something which was expected and not anything unexpected. We all know that coronaviruses have adapted to develop several strategies to continue their replication and to infect and reinfect several species over millions of years. Most of us here know that coronaviruses evolved in bats and other extremely immunocompetent, long - lived organisms. Well, the virus literally learnt so many tricks - evading early immune defenses, diminishing immunity, and metamorphosis to allow multiple reinfections.
To some extent, we can say that the behavior of bats is similar to that of humans, like, living in dense communities, but able to move from one community to another, interacting with other species along the way. Coronaviruses know how to thrive in the host species as well as how to infect neighboring species. There is this process called reverse zoonosis. So when we consider this process (reverse zoonosis), we can very well say that coronaviruses have made a leap from animals to humans, and SARS-CoV-2 shows us a clear vision of it leaping back into animals to re - emerge and invade us again - this is exactly the reverse zoonosis process I'm talking about.
On having a quick glance at the genomes of the coronaviruses that have emerged from different species, we can pretty much understand that these viruses can readily recombine amongst each other, in addition to the point mutations observed in Omicron and in other known SARS-CoV-2 variants.
If Omicron can evade neutralising antibodies, it does not mean that the immune responses triggered by prior infection and vaccination will offer zero protection against the variant. There were immunity studies which suggest that adequate levels of neutralising antibodies may protect people from the severe cases of COVID - 19. Let's now look at the T cells part of the immune system... T cells may be less affected by Omicron's mutations than are antibody responses. Measuring the activity of T cells and natural killer cells, might be extremely crucial for protection against severe COVID - 19.
Something which really matters when it comes to long term outlook, according to me, is that Omicron is inherently more transmissible than its predecessors. If it's just all about immune evasion, then probably Omicron's potential advantages over Delta might decline as immunity to it builds up, and the two could end up cocirculating. If Omicron is more infectious, then it might end up replacing Delta, just like how Delta replaced other variants.
Approximately one - tenth of the Omicron genomes sequenced so far have an additional mutation in the spike protein called 346K that is predicted to make it even better at evading the immune system.
More than 50 nucleic acids changes in Omicron from the reference SARS-CoV-2 sequence - makes it hard to detect?!
Do think about it and let me know your opinions in the comment section :) stay scientifically tuned and thanks for reading!
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