The unusual cases of pneumonia began to appear in midwinter, in China. The cause, researchers would later learn, was a coronavirus new to science. By March, the infection began to spread to other ...

Early 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, ...

As evidence mounts that the omicron variant is less deadly than prior COVID-19 strains, one oft-cited explanation is that viruses always evolve to become less virulent over time. The problem, experts ...

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford have developed an artificial intelligence tool called EVEscape that can predict how a virus will evolve to become a new variant, ...