The virus may change to no longer be fatal or cause serious illness.
A leading scientist has today warned that the battle against Covid will last at least ten years as the Kent Covid strain is set to spread worldwide.
Battle against Covid to last 10 years
The director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium, Professor Sharon Peacock, has stated that she believes that the Kent strain of the virus is probably going to spread to all parts of the world.
The professor of public health and microbiology at Cambridge University’s Department of Medicine clarified that the threat from the Covid virus would be massively reduced as vaccines are rolled out, medicines improve and people understand how social distancing can combat it.
She also explained that the virus could change to no longer be fatal or cause serious illness.
During an interview with the BBC, she said: “Once we get on top of [the virus] or it mutates itself out of being virulent – causing disease – then we can stop worrying about it. But I think, looking in the future, we’re going to be doing this for years. We’re still going to be doing this ten years down the line, in my view.”
In addition to that, she said that the Kent variant, which has been detected in almost all parts of the UK and in over 50 countries, has “swept the country” and “it’s going to sweep the world, in all probability”.
The new variant first spread to London and parts of southern and eastern England which were put into Tier 4 before Christmas, subsequently stricter measures have been placed throughout the entirety of the UK.
The Kent strain has since been known as B117. Analysis of the variant indicates that it is up to 70 percent more transmissible than the original strain that was dominant in the UK and in most parts of the world which many believe to have originated in Wuhan, despite the WHO’s investigation concluding otherwise.
