People who are not vaccinated for Covid-19 pose a danger to everyone as they may unwittingly become “variant factories,” infectious disease experts have said.
Viruses need to multiply in order to create new variants. As a result, the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected individual.
"The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply," according to Dr William Schaffner, a professor at the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre quoted by CNN.
"When [coronavirus multiplies], it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road," he added.
Andrew Pekosz, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN: “"As mutations come up in viruses, the ones that persist are the ones that make it easier for the virus to spread in the population.
"Every time the virus changes, that gives the virus a different platform to add more mutations. Now we have viruses that spread more efficiently," he added
Several Covid-19 variants have developed since the beginning of the pandemic. One of the most recent is the Delta variant that emerged in India in the last few months.
The World Health Organization has said the Delta variant of Covid-19 is now present in nearly 100 countries as per conservative estimates and warned that in the coming months the highly transmissible strain will become the dominant variant of the coronavirus globally.
As per latest WHO figures, cases of the Alpha variant have been reported in 172 countries, territories or areas, Beta in 120 countries, Gamma in 72 countries, and Delta in 96 countries.
