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The easiest way to stay informed that I've found is to read through this guy's tweets. I sort of work in a related field and I know just enough to say that he is highly credible, and I think he does an excellent job of synthesizing and sourcing complex information.

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing

Once you understand what he is saying, then do some exploring on your own to see if he is a crackpot or if other serious scientists are saying the same things he is.

There are several key dimensions to be thinking about with the new variants:

a) do they spread more easily?
b) do they result in more serious cases of COVID and greater risk of death or serious lasting consequences?
c) do they affect different populations?
d) how well does the vaccine work against them?

Here are the answers based on current knowledge, recognizing that there are many new variants and some have scarcely been studied:

a) definitely much, much more easily
b) luckily, the answer so far is no
c) yes, they are much more likely to infect children
d) the vaccine seems to work at half strength against some, and not at all for others, but there is hope that the development cycle for new vaccines will be much shorter

As for timing, we are expecting the B117 variant to be the dominant strain in March -- in part because the old strain is coming down and in part because the new strain is coming on. It will be dominant by early March in Florida and in much of the rest of the country by the end of March. Nobody knows how many cases the US will ultimately have, but everything I have read tells me it will be the worst surge yet -- perhaps by a lot.

And B117 is not the worst of the new strains. And the others will come over time.

We could have stopped all of this by having everyone in the US just stay inside for 3 weeks, followed by a more active CDC response of contact tracing, testing, genetic sequencing, mask wearing, and distancing. The serious experts knew what we were facing, but some people in this country viewed any urging that we face up to the truth of science as some sort of infringement of our liberty to be a COVID-riddled nation. So, this is the path we have chosen to be on.

Maybe we can still try a 2-3 week lockdown (with obvious exemptions for getting vaccinated)? Not a half-assed lockdown where 70 percent of the economy is deemed essential, but a full-bore effort to knock the virus down to 1/10th or 1/100th the number of cases, so that vaccines, contact tracing, testing, quarantines, masks, and distancing can do the rest?

But that seems unlikely to be the path the US will take. The CDC seems to be doing its thing whereby it doesn't want to alarm people until crap starts to happen. Personally, I prefer to be forward-looking. For whatever reason, the majority in our country either rejects science or just can't face reality. If you add in a government that doesn't want to alarm them with straight talk about the future, it adds up to us walking into a shitshow. Bringing a knife to a gunfight, or whatever your favorite analogy is.