COVID won’t necessarily evolve milder, but evolving immunity makes it look like that
Fact check: The theory that SARS-CoV-2 is becoming
"It's comforting to think there might be some tendency for SARS-CoV-2 to evolve toward a milder form. That's not what we're seeing here."
"It's important to emphasize that the next variant — and there will definitely be one — may not evolve from omicron and it will not necessarily have these characteristics,"
Before omicron came along, SARS-CoV-2 was actually evolving to be more severe, says Bhattacharyya, of Harvard Medical School. "We're looking at a virus that's gotten progressively more severe over time," he says.
And thus, there's no guarantee that the next variant to emerge will be milder. It could be the most severe yet.
So future variants will likely continue to improve their ability to infect and grow in the upper respiratory tract (and they will continue to be more immune evasive).
"Whether those changes also make the new variant more severe or less severe, that's kind of the luck of the draw" Bhattacharyya says.
Why doom and gloom isn't the only scenario
On the surface, this sounds horrible, right? It suggests that the next surge, after this omicron one, could be worse than even the delta surge.
But Goldstein says that's probably not likely because there's one more factor to take into account: people's immunity.
"Whether you've been previously infected or vaccinated, you're more likely to have a milder course than a person who is immune naive," Goldstein says.
And thus, over time, all future variants will likely look less severe than delta or earlier versions of the virus. "Even if the variant had no change in virulence, if the population now has a high level of existing immunity, then [the variant] will, in effect, be less virulent because the average severity of infections will go down over time," he says.
So the hope among scientists is that no matter what the virus throws at us, future waves of COVID-19 will be less deadly and less disruptive, not because the virus itself has changed but because our bodies will be better able to handle the virus.