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So this month marks five years since officials at the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

And we have come a long way since then.

Researchers have figured out ways to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with masking and air filtering.

They've developed safe treatments and vaccines, and they've tracked hundreds of thousands of different mutations.

And now we know something else, how those mutations evolved.

Because if you remember, in March of 2020, a lot of scientists predicted that the coronavirus

was not going to evolve very much.

It was thought that the coronavirus mutated pretty slowly, like half as fast as the flu,

or only as quarter as fast as HIV.

This is Sarah Zang, a health writer for the Atlantic.

Back in 2020, some scientists thought that once vaccines arrived, they would offer years of protection.

Unfortunately, I think we know what actually happened, which is that in the winter of 2020,

we sort of got like this first big variant, what it was known as Alpha.

And then we just kept getting more and more variants.

Beta, Delta, Omicron, the coronavirus continued to mutate to make these evolutionary jumps that helped it survive.

And for a long time, scientists didn't know why.

Sarah wrote a piece about this for the Atlantic last month, focusing on a series of studies that point to a relatively new idea that the virus could be incubating and mutating further in one specific group of people.

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