> It may already be getting harder for SARS-CoV-2 to make big gains in infectiousness. “There are some fundamental limits to exactly how good a virus can get at

> It may already be getting harder for SARS-CoV-2 to make big gains in infectiousness. “There are some fundamental limits to exactly how good a virus can get at transmitting and at some point SARS-CoV-2 will hit that plateau,” says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “I think it’s very hard to say if this is already where we are, or is it still going to happen.” Evolutionary virologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research guesses the virus still has space to evolve greater transmissibility. “The known limit in the viral universe is measles, which is about three times more transmissible than what we have now with Delta,” he says. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/new-sars-cov-2-variants-have-changed-pandemic-what-will-virus-do-next https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/new-sars-cov-2-varia...