What is Viral Interference and Can It Help Us?

Jennifer R. Povey
6 min readDec 12, 2022
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

2022 COVID is not 2020 COVID. My father’s partner, who had a serious chronic lung disease caught it a couple of months ago and was hospitalized.

In 2020 she would have died. This is why I haven’t seen my father since 2019. I couldn’t risk it.

Some people think the pandemic is over. My response is “Close, but not quite.” The fracturing into multiple variants, the disappearance of all lineages except Omicron…these are signs that SARS-CoV-2 is settling towards its final form. Likely it will be, at least for a while, another flu-like virus, annoying to most people, potentially dangerous to the frail elderly and immunocompromised. Then it will probably drift into being one of the more serious cold viruses like its relative OC-43.

But the pandemic is not quite over yet.

We are still seeing 300 or so deaths a day from COVID-19 in the U.S. China is…well, China is finally having to lie on the bed they built from locking down too hard.

But I’m here to talk about a poorly understood phenomenon that may affect how the winter of 2022 looks.

A Viral Triple Threat

I have answered more than one person who asked me why I was still wearing a mask with “influenza.”

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Jennifer R. Povey

I write about fantasy, science fiction and horror, LGBT issues, travel, and social issues.