... under the surface, something new — and potentially dangerous for the most vulnerable among us — has been happening: Omicron has started to “splinter.”
As a result, we may be entering the next phase of the pandemic. Thanks to layers of immunity from vaccination and prior infection — plus lifesaving treatments such as Paxlovid — we will almost certainly never regress to the horrific era of collapsing ICUs and thousands of deaths per day.
Yet the orderly succession of individually dominant variants we’ve come to expect over the last two years — think Alpha, then Beta, then Delta, then Omicron — may also be a thing of the past.
Instead, what scientists are seeing now is a bunch of worrisome Omicron descendants arising simultaneously but independently in different corners of the globe — all with the same set of advantageous mutations that help them dodge our existing immune defenses and drive new waves of infection. ...
