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Mutant coronavirus in the United Kingdom sets off alarms but its importance remains unclear
Kai KupferschmidtScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.On 8 December, during a regular Tuesday meeting about the spread of the pandemic coronavirus in the United Kingdom, scientists and public health experts saw a diagram that made them sit up straight. Kent, in the southeast of England, was experiencing a surge in cases, and a phylogenetic tree showing viral sequences from the county looked very strange, says Nick Loman, a microbial genomicist at the University of Birmingham.