Helen Branswell of STAT News, one of the best science writers around, interviewed a whole bunch of scientists and public health experts about what surprised them about the COVID pandemic. It’s fascinating. Some of them were surprised by things like the supply chain breakdown or the eerie quiet of the streets during the early days. With others it was the virus itself. You need to read the whole thing, but I’ve excerpted a few of the findings below: The biggest surprise, hands down: How the virus has evolved In the early days of the pandemic, before the new virus had a name, people who had studied coronaviruses offered reassuring predictions about the stability of the virus, which has implications for how often people might be reinfected and how frequently vaccines would need to be updated. Coronaviruses don’t change very quickly, they aren’t as mutable as, say, influenza viruses, those experts said. In fact, the spike protein on the virus’ exterior, the one that attaches to human cells and triggers infection, cannot change too much without losing its ability to infect, they assured the rest of us. That was the dogma. Then came the variants: Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron, with its mind-boggling array of mutations. Since it emerged in late 2021, Omicron has splintered into a seemingly endless succession of subvariants, which continue to mutate and evade immunity induced by prior infection and immunization. Many of the people STAT interviewed cited SARS-CoV-2’s evolution as their biggest surprise of the pandemic. “It’s…