Thread by @Reuters

'When will it end?' Chris Murray, a disease expert, asked himself referring to the pandemic.

He is currently updating his model to account for variants’ ability to escape natural immunity and expects to provide new projections as early as this week reut.rs/2NOdEJH

Murray is director of the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation whose projections on COVID-19 infections and deaths are closely followed worldwide.

He is changing his assumptions about the course of the pandemic

Murray had until recently been hopeful that the discovery of several effective vaccines could help countries achieve herd immunity, or nearly eliminate transmission through a combination of inoculation and previous infection

But in the last month, data from a vaccine trial in South Africa showed not only that a rapidly-spreading coronavirus variant could dampen the effect of the vaccine, it could also evade natural immunity in people who had been previously infected

'I couldn’t sleep' after seeing the data, Murray told @Reuters.

A new consensus is emerging among scientists, according to Reuters interviews with specialists who closely track the pandemic or are working to curb its impact

Many described how the vaccine breakthrough late last year had initially sparked hope that the virus could be largely contained but recent data on new variants has undercut that optimism

They now believe that SARS-CoV-2 will not only continue to circulate in communities but will likely cause a significant burden of illness and death for years to come.

Read more reut.rs/2NOdEJH @JDSteenhuysen and @kkelland