The Rise and Fall of SARS-CoV-2 Variants and Ongoing Diversification of Omicron.

In late December of 2019, high-throughput sequencing technologies enabled rapid identification of SARS-CoV-2 as the etiological agent of COVID-19, and global sequencing efforts are now a critical tool for monitoring the ongoing spread and evolution of this virus. Here, we provide a short retrospective analysis of SARS-CoV-2 variants by analyzing a subset ( = 97,437) of all publicly available SARS-CoV-2 genomes ( = ~11.9 million) that were randomly selected but equally distributed over the course of the pandemic.