Since the declaration of public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the WHO, the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has led to over 300 million confirmed cases with more than 5 million deaths in the past 2 years. On top of that, SARS-CoV-2 continues evolving into many variants, and many of these variants with evidence to enhance viral transmissibility, adaptiveness, infectivity, and/or to escape from host immune response are classified as variants of concerns (VOC). 1 Since the outbreak of the pandemic, five VOCs, including Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Omicron have been verified by the WHO.
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Zhang et al. (2022) studied this question.
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