arly in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists predicted the coronavirus would mutate slowly. They were wrong.
Hundreds of thousands of viral mutations and multiple seasonal waves later, researchers now know why.
Turns out, SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes the disease COVID-19 — was making evolutionary leaps and bounds in one specific group of people.
“When the virus jumps from person to person, it gets about two mutations a month,” says Sarah Zhang, a health writer for The Atlantic, who has been covering the coronavirus pandemic since it began.
In February, she wrote a piece comparing several studies indicating that in the immune system of an immunocompromised person, the SARS-CoV-2 virus might survive for weeks, even months.