This is finally out.
Very short take home. All the variation in spike that produced the immune escape characteristics of Omicron can occur in one single persistently infected individual over the period of a year.
This is why persistent infections matter
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections
Snell et al. develop sequencing methodology to identify full-length spike haplotypes
and show that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections drive divergent haplotype emergence,
accelerating viral evolution an...
