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XBB is a new edition of Omicron that evades existing immunity.
It is spreading in Singapore and virus watchers fear it could spread to the United States.
BQ. 1. 1 is also emerging. Experts say: be prepared for more COVID infections this winter.
As Halloween approaches, whispers of the COVID variant “nightmare” in the direction scare Wall Street journalists and analysts.
The new variant is called XBB and is already triggering a new wave of infections and hospitalizations in some South Asian countries, India and Singapore.
XBB is just one of the “multiple most immune-evading Omicron subvariants worldwide,” Dr. Anna Stuart told Insider. Celine Gounder, infectious disease expert and senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But “among the new variants, XBB has the ultimate immune-evading properties,” Morgan Stanley market meteorologists said in a note Thursday.
Given that we’ve now seen almost three full years of COVID variants, and almost a year of other Omicrons before XBB came out, how worried should we be about this new edition of the virus?
Experts say we expect many more infections this fall and winter, adding infections among vaccinated and hardened Americans. But there are undeniable things you can do to prepare to combat XBB and other evasive variants of COVID on the horizon.
XBB is a recombinant variant: it is a mixture of two other subvariants of BA. 2 Omicron (in particular, BA. 2. 10. 1 BA. 2. 75).
As other Omicrons noted before, XBB “finds tactics to escape how we get immunity to previous vaccines and infections, with adjustments to the spike protein,” John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
It remains to be seen whether XBB will dominate the COVID infection landscape in the U. S. It will be a choice among Omicron’s wide diversity of subvariants.
So far, it doesn’t even make a dent on the radar of U. S. virus watchers. Compared to other Omicrons. Es imaginable that the BA. 5 subvariant, BQ. 1. 1. , which is already on the rise in Europe, will prove to be more of a fear for Americans than XBB ever will be.
Professor Moritz Gerstung, a computational biologist in Germany, recently said on Twitter that we may be in a “close race” between BQ. 1. 1 and XBB in the coming months. Both have a slight expansion merit over BA. 5, which lately is the dominant edition of COVID in the US. U. S.
Our Data World / COVID-19 CSSE Data from Johns Hopkins University
In Singase, reinfections and hospitalizations are increasing, driven by XBB: local trends suggest that this edition of the virus may also be slightly milder than BA. 5, with a 30% decrease in the risk of hospitalization.
XBB and BQ. 1. 1 also show resistance to monoclonal antibodies, a remedy used for COVID patients.
That’s why Gounder insists that, whatever happens next, “it’s vital for those at maximum risk, adding other people 50 and older and other immunocompromised people, to recover immediately if they haven’t already done so this fall. “
Remember: it’s still Omicron, and new impulses from Pfizer and Moderna point to BA. 4 and BA. 5, which are tied to XBB.
That means existing vaccines still “protect against serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Gounder said. “But I expect a lot of infection gains despite vaccination” over the next few winter months, he added, either with XBB or some other new evasive variant.
According to CDC data, fewer than 15 million Americans have earned an updated reminder so far this fall; That’s less than 5% of the country, so there’s room for improvement with:
No more bivalent arm boosters (they’re loose in the U. S. )UU)
More strategic masking
Gounder said he knows Americans are fed up with mitigation measures, but said “high-quality masks will reduce transmission, especially in indoor public spaces” this winter.
Read the article on Business Insider