Synchronized attachment and the Darwinian evolution of coronaviruses CoV-1 and CoV-2

CoV2019 has evolved to be much more dangerous than CoV2003. Experiments suggest that structural rearrangements dramatically enhance CoV2019 activity. We identify a new first stage of infection that precedes structural rearrangements by using biomolecular evolutionary theory to identify sequence differences enhancing viral attachment rates. We find a small cluster of mutations which show that CoV-2 has a new feature that promotes much stronger viral attachment and enhances contagiousness. The extremely dangerous dynamics of human coronavirus infection is a dramatic example of evolutionary approach of self-organized networks to criticality. It may favor a very successful vaccine. The identified mutations can be used to test the present theory experimentally. •CoV2019 has evolved to be much more dangerous than CoV2003.•We use a new thermodynamic method of sequence analysis to explain many differences.•Thermodynamic scaling exploits self-organized criticality in protein amino acid sequences,•Scaling identifies critical wave lengths in Coronavirus evolution, not identifiable by BLAST.•We discover a new feature that enhances contagiousness in the absence of symptoms.