Experts warn China’s Covid outbreak could be ‘breeding ground’ for more variants

Dr Clarke added: “Large scale, mass infections — even if they don’t cause severe disease — are a cauldron of virus evolution which allows them to change and potentially become more lethal or less sensitive to existing immunity.”

Not all experts, however, are as concerned about the risk of new viral variants emerging from China’s current outbreaks. Despite predicting a “major Covid wave” in the near future, with considerable morbidity and mortality, University College London computational biologist Professor Francois Balloux is among this number.

He told MailOnline: “The major variants we have seen — Alpha, Delta and Omicron — likely arose from long-term infections in immunocompromised patients. As such, a major surge in China is not expected to drastically increase the risk of emergence of new variants, at least not in the very short term.

“I’m also not convinced that, given the urgency of the humanitarian and epidemiological situation in China, the emergence of future variants is really what we should be obsessing about right now.”

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Article source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1702982/china-coronavirus-covid-virus-evolution-new-variant