"Chronic infections could be the best explanation for how variants such as Omicron and Alpha evolved." - How months-long COVID infections could seed dangerous new variants - Nature | Omicron Covid variant 'does not give immunity to reinfection,' study shows | Long Covid symptoms: NHS says skin rashes are commonly reported
omicron origins - Google Search https://t.co/0sw25wQiij https://t.co/1HBEZJ6SD5 . — Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) June 15, 2022 "Ahead of that report, scientists are investigating three theories. Although researchers have sequenced millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, they might simply have missed a series of mutations that eventually led to Omicron. Alternatively, the variant might have evolved mutations in one person, as part of a long-term infection. Or it could have emerged unseen in other animal hosts, such as mice or rats. For now, whichever idea a researcher favours “often comes down to gut feeling rather than any sort of principled argument”, says Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “They are all fair game,” says Jinal Bhiman, a medical scientist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Everyone has their favourite hypothesis.” __________________________________________________________