Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
A wave of COVID infections caused by the BA.5 subvariant has crested. All over the world, daily new cases, hospitalizations and deaths are going down.
But the SARS-CoV-2 virus is almost certainly here to stay. Another wave is all but inevitable as new variants and subvariants mutate, compete for dominance and find new transmission pathways.
How fast that wave comes, and how bad it gets, probably comes down to a genetic competition between different mutations of the novel-coronavirus. If we get lucky, a mild form of the virus wins out—and buys us time to prepare for a worse form of the virus that’s almost certainly coming, sooner or later.