We’re now more than two years into the Covid pandemic in the UK, and despite successive rounds of vaccinations and booster shots the virus is still rife. More than one in 19 people currently have it.
The Guardian’s science correspondent Hannah Devlin tells Michael Safi that the way Covid is evolving continues to surprise scientists. Many believed that Covid would behave like other coronaviruses and be a seasonal illness that an annual winter jab could protect against. But this latest wave is in summer, and it has come very close on the heels of the last wave. Not only that but it seems to be continually finding new ways to get around the protections of the body’s immune system. Even those who have had the virus and multiple jabs are still getting reinfected.
However, the vaccine programme has been responsible for a huge reduction in deaths, and while there is still significant Covid pressure on the NHS, there are not the shocking numbers of fatalities we were seeing in the early waves. But if we are now living with Covid in the long term, a virus that can repeatedly make us ill, how do we adapt as a society?
Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
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