(USA Today) The bad news is that a new strain of the coronavirus racing across England appears to be more infectious than the original. The good news is it doesn’t seem to make people any more sick.
The best news might be that vaccine makers routinely take mutations into account. Seasonal influenza vaccines, for example, include a variety of viral strains already circulating and allow for some that could develop later.
Melissa Nolan, an infectious disease expert and professor at the University of South Carolina, said the coronavirus vaccine designers expected that the virus would mutate and have included various predictions of viral strains.