The fear is that the sudden spread of Covid through a new population with relatively little prior exposure to the virus will lead to the emergence of a new “supervariant”—one that has the potential to change the face of the pandemic like the Alpha, Delta, and Omicron forms of the virus did before. But whether there’s a significant risk of this happening isn’t clear.
In 2020, Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, published a paper in the journal Nature demonstrating that chronic SARS-CoV-2 infections—where the virus lingers and multiplies inside the body of someone whose immune system is compromised—provide the virus with a greater opportunity to
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