**7. Conclusions**

The rapid development of diagnostic tools and COVID-19 vaccines was possible due to the characterization of viral genome and of the structure of the main viral immunogen-the spike glycoprotein.

Surveillance of the emergent variants and assessing their potential impact on the community by genotype to phenotype analysis may control reduction of the effectiveness of available antivirals and vaccines. COVID-19 vaccines developed to date proved to be highly active against hospitalizations and death across all ages, and their large-scale deployment in the middle and high-income countries, has decreased the pressure on the medical system and helped in reopening the economy.

Currently available antiviral therapies prove to be reasonably effective regardless of viral variants and their development should be an important strategy together with vaccination strategy improvement.

With the emergence of viral variants more antigenically distant from the vaccine strains, the utility of adaptation of the vaccine composition, either by adding a variant specific version or by developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine become an important point on the public health agenda.
