One Massive Pandemic May Be Similar To COVID

By Rishi Ganesh

With the state of the world currently, everyone’s mind has been on one thing, and one thing only over the last three years: COVID. The disease has spread like wildfire around the globe, and as of February 2022, 140 million Americans, or around 43% of the population, have had COVID at some point. Each day, the pandemic seems to drift further and further into normalcy, as the world begins to become comfortable with living in a new era of lifestyle. It’s safe to say that the coronavirus has changed the world, from sending students to online school to prompting massive relief efforts.

And it’s not even the most impactful pandemic in the world.

That title belongs to another, much more pervasive, deadly, and subtle virus: HIV/AIDS. This retrovirus has taken a far different approach to today’s coronavirus. It’s a slow-burning pandemic, having began in the mid-20th century. Slowly latching into every corner of the world, it has come to boast a mind-boggling 95% mortality rate to those left untreated, drastically weakening the immune systems of the infected before other infections take root. In this way, HIV/AIDS has terrorized third-world, developing, and densely populated countries. Prevalence rates reach as high as 27% in some countries, often left without resources or money to treat their populations. But for all its differences, HIV/AIDS has one very important similarity to COVID-19: its evolution.

In the Netherlands, a new, far more transmissible version of HIV/AIDS was found, leading scientists around the world to compare it to the Omicron and Delta variants of the coronavirus currently plaguing their way around the globe. The evolution of these two drastically different diseases is shockingly similar: the RNA transcription and translation leads to mutations happening in the same ways. But what does this mean? When cells replicate, they must replicate their DNA. In this way, viruses do the same thing, but RNA is far more prone to replication error than DNA is. For this reason, viruses often mutate due to errors in replication, and while a vast majority of these mutations result in useless new viruses, some lead to variant strains like Delta and Omicron.

With the current prevalence of COVID-19 and the emergence of deadlier HIV/AIDS variants, many scientists speculate that it won’t be long before another variant emerges soon, and that it could be deadlier still than any other variant we’ve seen yet. Of course, there is always the chance that we continue to see mild variants float around, but eventually it is almost inevitable that COVID, at its current pace, reaches a variant that is as transmissible as Omicron, but with the deadliness of the Delta variant, or perhaps even the SARS virus itself. This is why it’s still important to prevent transmission: as COVID infects more of the population, it becomes more and more likely that it mutates into a newer variant.