In the meantime, Drosten says that even "small influencing factors like a change in the weather" are enough to trigger or break a wave. A late summer of sorts in mid-October caused the numbers to drop immediately, he said. "The situation for the virus is getting precarious. That's good. It's no longer the case that the virus could completely turn the game around with a few mutations," Drosten told the newspaper.

In the short term, he does not expect a really nasty surprise in the form of a more dangerous variant of Sars-CoV-2, the Berlin researcher explained: "The virus cannot easily go back at many points in its evolution. It is a bit stuck and is currently only optimising."

For Drosten, how things develop in winter depends in part on which Coronavirus variant will prevail next: "Right now, two Omicron variants are taking the lead: BF.7 and BQ.1.1."Should the Omicron derivative BQ.1.1 become dominant, "winter could be difficult again," Drosten said. But he also sees the possibility of a mild winter wave.

Drosten, who is head of virology at Berlin's Charité University Hospital, has been relatively absent from press events and the media since the height of the pandemic. Regarding his account on the short message service Twitter, where almost one million people follow him and where he has not spoken for some time, he told the newspaper Die Zeit: "Digital life no longer interests me. I haven't even looked at Twitter for months."

Original text: dpa

Translation: Jean Lennox