The effort to quickly vaccinate as many people as possible against COVID-19 is aimed not only at slowing the pandemic, but also at slowing the development of new coronavirus variants.
"It’s like buying the virus a lottery ticket every time you let it infect a new person," explained Dr. Jeremy Kamil, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport.
"Most of those tickets are losers but you know, if you let it infect 50 million people there’s going to be a superball winner. And that’s what we’re seeing with these variants."
But Dr. Kamil told KCBS Radio's "Ask An Expert" that even though variants can make harmful changes to the variants, there is no need to panic.
"First thing to do is to stay calm, because a lot of these effects are quite small."
The one variant that has been proven to have an advantage in spreading is B117, which was first discovered in the UK.
"What that probably means is that it’s just on a per particle basis a little bit more infectious like for a human cell. Or once it gets into your cells, it’s better at spreading between them. It’s hard sometimes to distinguish between those two explanations and they can both be true."
However, Dr. Kamil added it's important for people to remember that "more infectious" does not mean it is more deadly, or more likely to cause someone to get sick. Strategies to prevent infection from the original strain will still be effective against new strains.
"It’s not a super-virus, it can’t drill a hole in your mask. So doing all the same things that you were doing before are just as prudent and wise to do, it just means don’t let your guard down,” he said. “There’s nothing magical about them and they absolutely are getting crushed by the vaccines. We should all be happy about that."
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