There is a "high chance" that a new Covid variant which is worse than Omicron will emerge in the next two years, England's chief medical officer, Chris Whitty has warned, report agencies.
He said that there was still a "long way to go" because the virus will continue to "throw surprises".
He also insisted the virus - which now poses a similar death threat as flu - will be with us "for the rest of our lives", Daily Mail reported.
Whitty noted that the strain could cause "worse problems" than Omicron and the challenges from the current strain are "not by any means trivial", and its emergence could "significantly change our balance of risk".
Dismissing the idea that Covid has become endemic, he said it is incorrect to assume the virus has reached a "stable state" around the globe, despite easing restrictions by many countries.
"And there's a high chance that we will all be discussing, and I will be discussing with my colleagues, a new variant at some point in the next two years that actually significantly changes our balance of risk," he said.
"We could well end up with a new variant that produces worse problems than we've got with Omicron and the Omicron problems are by no means trivial," he added.
UK's SAGE advisors have warned of a "realistic possibility" that a more lethal variant could emerge that kills one in three people, in line with earlier coronaviruses such as MERS.
This is because Omicron evolved from a different part of the virus's lineage, and there is no guarantee the next strain will evolve directly from Omicron.
Meanwhile, the overall number of Covid cases has surged past 477 million as the pandemic enters into its third year.
According to Worldometers tally the total case count mounted to 478,391,141 while the death toll from the virus reached 6,134,840 Friday evening.
More than 11.17 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. The latest rate was roughly 20.8 million doses a day.
The US has recorded 79,888,364 cases so far and 975,837 people have died from the virus in the country, the university data shows.
India's Covid-19 tally rose to 43,016,149 on Thursday, as 1,462 new cases were registered in 24 hours across the country, showed the federal health ministry data.
Besides, 82 deaths from the pandemic were reported since Wednesday morning, taking the total death toll to 516,785.
Meanwhile, Brazil, which has been experiencing a new wave of cases since January last year, registered 29,767,681 cases as of Thursday, while its Covid death toll rose to 658,367.
