> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into v

> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated. Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.