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This story appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.
The Northern Hemisphere is entering a new wave of Covid: while much of the world acts as if the pandemic is over, cases are surging again. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a report on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The U. S. has recorded a slight increase in positive Covid cases. tests, emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths in recent weeks, while cases and hospitalizations are also emerging in the United Kingdom.
But it is in Japan where the construction is visible. The country’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases reported that the average number of infected people in a medical facility has increased rapidly since June. In particular, Okinawa Prefecture has seen the highest number of newly hospitalized patients since reporting began, and it is conceivable that the virus is spreading in Japan at a faster rate than in the country’s last two primary waves, in September 2023 and January 2024.
The culprits for this increase are a new set of variants: KP. 3, LB. 1 and KP. 2. 3. Descendants of the Omicron JN. 1 subline that took over at Christmas, they have become the driving force of new infections around the world, and KP. 3 seems to be gaining dominance. As of July 15, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) The U. S. estimated that about 37% of new Covid cases in the U. S. UU. se owed KP. 3, while KP. 2 accounted for 24% and LB. 1 for 15%. KP. 3 has noticed an immediate increase in recent months: as of May 11, it accounted for about 9% of cases in the United States; a month later, on June 11, its percentage was 25%.
Together, those viruses are called FLiRT variants, because they all have a mutation in the spike protein that changes their amino acid 456 from phenylalanine (F) to leucine (L) and their amino acid 346 from arginine (R) to threonine. ). According to an article by the Institute of Medical Sciences of the University of Tokyo, published this year in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, these variants are more transmissible than the classic variants of the past and have a great ability to evade neutralizing antibodies.
Genotype to Phenotype Japan (G2P-Japan), a study consortium at the institute, estimates that the R numbers of FLiRT variants (the average number of new cases caused by an infected user and a measure of infectivity) are higher for those new forms. of the virus compared to JN. 1. Furthermore, when the infectivity of those viruses was assessed in cultured cells, KP. 3 required a lower amount of virus to cause infection compared to LB. 1 and KP. 2. 3, which required approximately the same amount of virus as JN. 1. . Matrix These effects provide insight into why KP. 3 appears to be heading toward dominance.
The FLiRT variants, added to KP. 3, also outpace the ability of the virus’s previous bureaucracy to evade immunity. When the G2P-Japan team looked beyond infections, breakthrough infections (those that adhere to vaccination), and neutralizing antibody responses induced through the updated Covid vaccine XBB. 1. 5, they found that in all cases, neutralizing activity against FLiRTs was particularly lower than that of FLiRTs, against existing epidemic variants.
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