Coronavirus variants will prolong the pandemic. But here’s how it will end [San Francisco Chronicle]
Jan. 24 More than 130 years ago, a brutal respiratory virus swept across the globe, killing a million people out of a worldwide population of 1.5 billion before fading away, eventually overshadowed in history by the deadlier 1918 influenza pandemic.
That 1890 pandemic, which some scientists believe was caused by a coronavirus, may offer a glimpse of the modern world’s escape from COVID-19 or at least one possible path in a future that’s still largely clouded by uncertainty.
The United States is in a desperate race to speed up vaccinations and develop herd immunity that would end the pandemic. But with several variants of the virus now emerging, including one or more that could make the vaccines less effective, it’s increasingly unclear what the finish line even looks like.
More than 130 years ago, a brutal respiratory virus swept across the globe, killing a million people out of a worldwide population of 1.5 billion before fading away, eventually overshadowed in history by the deadlier 1918 influenza pandemic. That 1890 pandemic, which some scientists believe was caused by a coronavirus, may offer a glimpse of the modern world’s escape from COVID-19 or at least one possible path in a future that’s still largely.
California braces for troubling new variant as U.S. nears 400,000 deaths
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Stacia Wyman, a senior scientist, scrutinizes Covid-19 genomes at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley.Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
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Stacia Wyman, a computational biologist, looks at a visualization of an evolutionary tree of the Covid-19 viral genomes at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, Calif. on Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021.Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
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Stacia Wyman stands for a portrait at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, Calif. on Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021.Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less