| When scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory found a new mutation that appeared to make the coronavirus more contagious last spring, many scientists were skeptical. But it turned out to be a harbinger. Now new variants are popping up everywhere, and biologists are racing to develop tools to understand it all. "By watching it carefully, we can stay ahead of the virus, and that is what everyone is scrambling to do right now," says Bette Korber, the computational biologist at Los Alamos who helped discover that first mutation. Her work is part of a massive effort to quickly detect variants that may lessen the effectiveness of vaccines—and provide the world some insight into how the SARS-CoV-2 virus could evolve. While Covid-19 is unlikely to be eradicated anytime soon, it could gradually become less dangerous over time. Or like influenza, it may retain its ability to cause severe disease in some parts of the population, requiring regular booster shots. The rise of variants is partly our fault: We've allowed the virus infect more than 125 million people worldwide. Uncontrolled spread gives virus strains "more rolls of the dice to develop more mutations that benefit them," says Jonathan Li, an infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He has studied how mutations arose in an immunocompromised patient with a long-lasting case of Covid-19. But the situation with variants is so maddeningly complex that even top experts can't predict what will happen. Will the virus run out of major moves to resist vaccines? Or will it keep steadily mutating to escape existing immunity? You get a different answer depending on whom you ask. In addition to creating computational rapid-response tools to analyze variants as they are reported into databases, scientists are looking backward to study how previous coronaviruses—those that cause common colds—have changed over time. This research suggests that the virus will probably continue to slowly mutate and evade the immune system. But with luck—and good vaccines—enough immunity may remain to prevent severe cases, even if mild reinfections occur. If this happens, Covid-19 may eventually turn into another common cold.—Robert Langreth | 
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