COVID-19 has made a comeback. China has been badly hit and even as United States President Joe Biden has flagged the Communist nation’s response to the outbreak, he has a lot to worry about in his own land. Coronavirus cases are rising in the United States and scientists have raised concerns about a new COVID-19 variant, which is spreading fast. It’s called XBB.1.5.
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What do we know about XBB.1.5?
XBB.1.5 is the latest descendant of the Omicron variant, which is dominating the US. It has evolved from the XBB variant, which spread widely in India and Singapore last year between September and November. Highly transmissible, it also caused a rise in cases in the United Kingdom last winter.Is it more dangerous than other variants?
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that the XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant is the most contagious version of COVID-19 yet, but it doesn’t appear to make people sicker.
“It is the most transmissible subvariant that has been detected yet,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, to reporters in Geneva on Wednesday. “The reason for this is the mutations that are within this subvariant of Omicron allowing this virus to adhere to the cell and replicate easily.”
XBB.1.5 has a “growth advantage” above all other sub-variants seen so far but there is no indication that it is more harmful, according to WHO scientists.
XBB.1.5 has rapidly replaced other variants in the Northeast US. File photo/AFP
How widespread is the variant?
XBB.1.5 accounts for more than 40 per cent of the cases in the US, according to information provided by Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding on his official Twitter handle based on unreleased data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The variant seems to have started infecting people in or around New York state in late October. In early December, it accounted for four per cent of the cases. Now it has quickly overtaken other variants.
As of last Friday, it was responsible for an estimated 75 per cent of cases in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, according to the federal health agency.
“In recent weeks there have been increasing reports of hospitalisations and health system pressure, particularly in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, where respiratory diseases, including flu, are also circulating,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.
The Northeast US, where XBB.1.5 is responsible for most sequenced COVID cases, is seeing increasing hospitalisations, Van Kerkhove said.
But it’s not only the US where the variant poses. XBB.1.5 has been detected in 29 countries so far but it could be more widespread, the epidemiologist said.
In some parts of the US, there has been a rise in hospitalisations. AFP
Has XBB.1.5 been detected in India?
Five cases of the XBB.1.5 variant have been detected in India, the coronavirus monitoring body, the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), said on Tuesday. It has been found in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka.
The first case of the variant was found in a man from Rajasthan’s Sikar who returned from the US on 19 December.
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Do vaccines work against XBB.1.5?
According to scientists, XBB.1.5 dodges antibodies from vaccines and infections like XBB and XBB.1 relatives – two of the most immune evasive subvariants yet. But XBB.1.5 has a mutation that makes it bind more tightly to cells, giving it a growth advantage, reports CNBC.
Dr Rajeev Jayadevan, Co-chairman of the National IMA Covid task force, told ANI, “XBB.1.5 has a greater ability to attach itself to the human ACE-2 receptor while retaining the outstanding immune evasiveness of its ancestor.”
He said that this variant can infect those who had prior infection or even vaccination. “Immune evasiveness is the ability of the virus to infect people who had prior infection or vaccination or both. XBB.1.5 achieved this by creating a rare type of mutation called F486P, located in its RBD (receptor binding domain). It is not known whether it causes more severe diseases. Experts believe it is unlikely to do so,” he said.
The variant can infect those who have been vaccinated. File photo/AFP
Can it lead to another wave?
The answer is yes. The UK is already on alert as recent figures for a week until 17 December from the Sanger Institute in Cambridge suggested that one in 25 Covid cases in the UK were XBB.1.5, according to the BBC.
Prof Wendy Barclay from Imperial College London told the BBC that there are likely to be more hospitalisations in the UK if the variant takes off.
However, WHO experts say that more cases do not mean more deaths. “The more this virus circulates the more opportunities it will have to change. We do expect further waves of infection around the world but that doesn’t have to translate into further waves of death because our countermeasures continue to work,” Van Kerkhove said.
Ravi Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian that there was no need to panic. “The main thing we worry about is the severity of the disease, and there is no evidence that it’s more severe. People should, however, make sure they are up to date with their vaccines,” he said.
With inputs from agencies
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