The long sentence.

Dr Marc Baguelin, from Imperial College’s Covid-19 response team and a member of the government’s SPI-M modelling group, said preventing the importation of variants of concern with “moderate to high immune-escape properties would be critical, as these could lead to future waves orders of magnitude larger than the ones experienced so far”.

I've got to read the sentence above several times to understand that. In other words, when I'm at the end of the sentence, I fail to connect that end of the sentence with its beginning.

My question is: Do natives understand such a long sentence immediately, i.e., without reading it again?