It still hurts to swallow or drink. Water tastes off. She can’t sleep. She buried herself under blankets all weekend, but she couldn’t stay warm. Then came the pounding headache, the blocked sinuses. So far, she’s spent more than a week in self-isolation, toggling between British TV dramas and news reports about the rioters who wanted to assassinate her colleagues in Congress. Her husband’s symptoms are the same, but he is older than her and in a high-risk group.

The Atlantic has hired Candace Montgomery to help lead events as senior vice president and general manager of AtlanticLIVE. Montgomery joins The Atlantic from Essence, where she oversaw all events, including the strategic standup of the Essence Festival of Culture. The Atlantic is also releasing a first look at its early 2021 events lineup, including a new spring tentpole event focused on the pursuit of happiness with an eye to resiliency and recovery.

After a new variant of the coronavirus spread throughout the United Kingdom, daily cases hit record levels and the prime minister ordered a national lockdown. Now more mutations from South Africa and Brazil have made headlines.

In the final, darkest days of the deadliest year in U.S. history, the world received ominous news of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Scientists in the U.K. had identified a form of the virus that was spreading rapidly throughout the nation. Then, on January 4, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown that began almost immediately and will last until at least the middle of February.