Closer to the end?
The year 2021 has ended with a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 spreading rampantly around the world. Omicron has challenged not only the power of our weapons against the pandemic, but also some ideas about the possible evolution of the virus. Scientific studies have yet to confirm that it is more transmissible—which already seems in little doubt—and whether in turn it is milder, as claimed, or whether it is the immunity acquired through infection or vaccination that is keeping symptoms at bay in much of the population.
Meanwhile, scientists are trying to predict how SARS-CoV-2 will behave in the future. The hypothesis that it will never disappear, but will eventually become endemic, has been accepted since the beginning of the pandemic, but there is no unanimity about the likelihood of the emergence of more dangerous variants. The logical process of virus evolution dictated an initial increase in transmissibility in an immunized population, followed by an increased ability to evade the immune system once vaccines and infection have become widespread.
We can show that the macrophages from people with mild COVID-19 exhibit an altered inflammatory and metabolic expression for three to five months post-infection, says Craig Whee lock, docent at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolina Institute, and one of the study’s authors. Even though the majority of these people did not have any persistent symptoms, their immune system was more sensitive than that of their healthy counterparts
Long-term symptoms are relatively common after severe COVID-19 infection but may also affect some individuals with previous mild disease. More research is needed to understand the long-term immune aberrations in patients who have recovered from the acute phase of the infection.
New test for the climate
The 26th United Nations climate change conference, or COP26, ended in November in Glasgow with a bittersweet feeling: nations signed up to a new pact to cut emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010, but scientists warned that it was not enough to meet the Paris Agreement targets—keeping global warming well below 2 °C—and climate activists expressed dissatisfaction. In 2022, it will be necessary to see whether the commitments to reduce emissions and to monitor the progress made will begin to materialize. This monitoring will now intensify from high overhead: environmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Carbon Mapper have taken on the task of studying the health of the climate from space. The former is set to launch Methane SAT in October to monitor methane emissions.
Healing the biodiversity wound
Staying on the environmental theme, this will be the year to start making amends for another of humanity’s great failures. In 2020, the UN ended its Decade of Biodiversity by recognizing that most of the targets set in 2010 in Japan by the Convention on Biological Diversity had not been met, and that the loss of species has continued to grow at an accelerating rate. The COP15 on this issue, originally planned for 2020 in Kunming (China), had to be postponed because of the pandemic. In October 2021, it was reduced to a virtual meeting that should be completed in April and May of this year with the establishment of a new set of objectives to halt the ongoing extinction of species by 2050.
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