
This post will attempt to answer the following questions:
- What are viral variants and what do they do?
- What are the SARS CoV2 variants of concern?
- What is the difference between the UK and South African variants?
- Are the vaccines effective against the new strains?
- How do we know?
I was late. It was an early class and it was the furthest distance across campus and I was late for the first day of organic chemistry. The class was notorious for its brutality and I didn’t want to start behind, but behind I was. The auditorium had a few hundred seats and the decor made me feel as if I had traveled back in time 100 years with its wood paneling and musty aroma. The professor was a small woman dwarfed by the 10 oversized chalkboards that spread 30 feet a across and slid up and down like a dust covered guillotine. She had already started scribbling illegible hieroglyphics that I should have been paying attention to but I was more focused on where I was going to sit. There was not an empty seat in the room which was teeming with eager pre-meds with clean, unused notebooks and sharp cornered overpriced textbooks. I ended up sitting on the steps at the top of the aisle.
Continue reading “Will the vaccines work against the new COVID strains?”