Living with COVID-19: How the virus could turn into the common cold, or something far worse

As it races around the world, the COVID-19 omicron variant shows tantalizing hints that it could morph into the ideal virus: highly transmissible, to be sure, but tamed by vaccines and milder than previous, sometimes deadly versions. Yet the evolutionary arms race between humans and the virus is far from over, say biologists. This new relationship could get better — or suddenly worse. “We’re still in the early days of the ‘getting to know you’ phase,” said Stanford microbiologist Dr. David Relman. “And it’s in this phase that things are the least predictable, the least well understood and the …

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