Covid-19 Mutated. Can Vaccines Keep Up?
The European strain of the coronavirus is more contagious but not more deadly.
The virus that escaped Italy was more contagious.
Photographer: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty ImagesOne of the factors that will drive the future of the Covid-19 pandemic is how the virus evolves. And last week, scientists announced the first evidence that the virus has evolved to be more transmissible.
The mutation happened around late February, as the virus moved from East Asia to Europe. The first group to publish a paper raising this possibility was led by computational biologist and HIV evolution expert Bette Korber at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She couldn’t quite convince the scientific community, but virologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina was persuaded enough to continue this line of investigation. Last week, after a series of experiments in cells and hamsters, he and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin published a more complete case in Science. The implications for the history of the virus and its likely future are profound.