The Health 202: How bad are these coronavirus variants? Here's what experts say. Paige Winfield Cunningham with Alexandra Ellerbeck The pathway out of the coronavirus pandemic is looking somewhat bumpier than it did one month ago. Three more transmissible strains are threatening to prolong the United States’s struggle with the virus. These mutations are tempering hopes that life might start feeling more normal by the summer – even as the daily pace of immunizations accelerates. “The road to herd immunity from the coronavirus suddenly looks longer,” our colleagues Joel Achenbach and Ariana Eunjung Cha report. “The emergence of more transmissible, potentially vaccine-evading variants threatens to extend the global health disaster and make 2021 feel too much like 2020.”