All at once, the coronavirus seemed to change. For months, Dr. Steven Kemp, an infectious disease expert, had been scanning a global library of coronavirus genomes. He was studying how the virus had mutated in the lungs of a patient struggling to shake a raging infection in a nearby Cambridge hospital, and he wanted to know if those changes would turn up in other people. Then, in late November, Kemp made a startling match: Some of the same mutations detected in the patient, along with other changes, were appearing again and again in newly infected people, mostly in Britain. Worse, the changes were concentrated in the spike protein the virus uses to latch onto human cells, suggesting that a...
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