A Canadian health expert on the federal government’s COVID-19 Task Force says that Canada and the rest of the world will most likely see the novel coronavirus become a part of the viral ecosystem, similar to the seasonal endemic flu, due to the spread of several variants of concern.

To deal with such a spread, vaccine makers will have to adapt and modify their shots over the coming years, Dr. Alan Bernstein, an expert on Canadian government’s Covid-19 Task Force, was quoted as saying to Globalnews.ca. Canada is already negotiating with vaccine suppliers for it, he said.

"We’ve been in this journey before, of course, with (the) flu, we all get the influenza vaccine every year and every year is a different vaccine because the influenza virus changes every year,” said Bernstein. “So those are variants, and some years, of course, the flu variants can be very serious and some years are quite mild – the ones that are serious, we don’t call them variants of concern, but we could.”

Canada alone has seen the spread of at least four variants of concern - one of which Bernstein and several health experts have pointed to as having taken over as the dominant version of COVID-19 in Canada and several other parts of the world.

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