The New Variant

The new variant of the virus, being called the "UK variant" (much to the UK's chagrin), is already pretty widespread, appearing in over 30 countries and several US states. It's more infectious (possibly because it infects people with a higher viral load, which means they have more virus to spread to others), but no more dangerous. However, it actually is more dangerous, because if more people are getting infected at one time, and there's already so many people infected that hospitals are having to ration care and turn people away who normally would have gotten treatment, then this will make that situation much worse.

The UK actually implemented a new nationwide lockdown starting today to try to get this under control, but considering there's already community spread in the US (i.e. people are getting it who haven't traveled or had contact with someone who has), it feels like too little, too late.

Now there's also a South Africa variant, which they're saying is "more problematic," though I can't figure out why from this article. It's more infectious? They also imply that the vaccines might be less effective against it, but why?

I'm not surprised by any of this, though. Viruses mutate, that's what they do. The cool thing about the RNA vaccines that have rolled out first is that it's easy to make a little tweak here and there and pump out updated vaccines quickly, rather than having to wait to regrow things in a lab.