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Let’s begin by defining our terms. Herd immunity is the hazy, long-promised end of the pandemic, but its requirements are quite specific. Jennie Lavine, a biologist at Emory University, likens it to wet logs in a campfire. If there’s enough water in the logs—if there’s enough immunity in a population—“you can’t get the fire to start, period,” she says. To be more technical about it, a population reaches herd immunity when the average number of people infected by a single sick person falls below one. Patient zero might infect another person, but that second person can’t infec...

For all their simplicity, viruses are sneaky little life forces. Take SARS-Cov-2, the virus behind Covid-19. Challenged with the human immune system, the virus has gradually reshuffled parts of its genetic material, making it easier to spread among a human population. The new strain has already terrorized South Africa and shut down the UK, and recently popped up in the United States. The silver lining is that our existing vaccines and antibody therapies are still likely to be effective against the new strain. But that’s not always the case. “Viral escape” is a nightmare scenario, in whi...

Computational biologists used an algorithm meant to model human language to instead predict how viruses could evolve to evade the immune system.

Gus Garcia-Roberts, Erin Mansfield and Caroline Anders, USA TODAY Published 1:04 am UTC Jan. 27, 2021 In the earliest days of what would become a historic pandemic, the novel coronavirus had unfettered access into and throughout the United States. Thousands of travelers came to San Francisco on a 14-hour direct flight from Wuhan, China — the origin of the virus — in just the first three weeks of January. The Chinese government shut down the flight on Jan. 23, eight days before President Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel by Chinese nationals went into effect. Other international flig...