Not to pile on, but winter is coming and the COVID-19 pandemic is about to get worse.
Not to pile on, but winter is coming and the COVID-19 pandemic is about to get worse. Not necessarily because of omicron – scientists are still working that one out – but because there’s more evidence than ever that COVID-19 is a seasonal disease.
We know this intuitively. It’s no surprise that moving indoors and closing windows bumps up transmission. But new analyses from University of Illinois researchers show that, underneath all the variants and waves, the disease has been cycling seasonally across the globe for nearly two years.
More significantly, the researchers identify a molecular culprit for the virus’s seasonal nature. The finding could help predict future mutations and potentially pave the way for new therapeutics or vaccines.
“Ours is the first proposal of a viral sensor that responds to external seasonal patterns of environment and physiology,” says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences and the C.R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, and senior author on the Methods in Microbiology study. “The structure should now become a focus for prediction, mitigation, and informed public health decision-making.”
Read more at: University of Illinois
University of Illinois researchers, including Gustavo Caetano-Anollés (pictured), drew from a discovery in coral reef bleaching to identify the protein on COVID's spike that drives seasonal mutation patterns. (Photo Credit: University of Illinois)
