Omicron offshoot XBB.1.5 may cause new Covid spike in the US, confirms CDC

Week after week, scientists have been witnessing an onslaught by Covid's Omicron variants in the United States, with BQs — BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 appearing to be edging out all the others to seize a modest lead, as reported by the CNN.The upshot has been a steady increase in cases and hospitalisations that never seemed to reach the zenithof this summer's BA.5 wave and was certainly nothing like the tsunami of sickness brought on by the original Omicron strain a year ago.

On Friday, the COVID-19 mutant dashboard from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed a new contender that would soon take the lead: XBB.1.5.

According to the CDC, XBB.1.5 increased from roughly 4% to 41% of new infections during the month of December 2022, more than doubling its portion of the COVID-19 pie each week for the previous four. As per CDC's calculations, XBB.1.5 is responsible for 75% of new infections in the Northeast region of the US.

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“For a few months now, we haven’t seen a variant that’s taken off at that speed,” said Pavitra Roychoudhury, director of Covid-19 sequencing at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s virology lab, who spoke to CNN.

This Omicron sublineage, according to virologists and epidemiologists, possesses characteristics that could lead to a new wave of COVID-19 cases in the US, however, it is yet unknown how massivethat wave will be or whether it would put more people at risk for hospitalisation.

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XBB.1.5 appears to have emerged in the United States, despite recent worries that a new Covid-19 threat could come from China's continuous growth, according to specialists. According to GISAID, a global initiative to catalogue and track coronavirus variations, it was initially discovered in New York and Connecticut in late October.

Apart from being highly immune evasive, XBB.1.5 has an additional feature that seems to be helping to fuel its growth. It has a key mutation at site 486, which allows it to bind more tightly to ACE2, the doors the virus uses to enter our cells.

The majority of scientists agreed that although XBB.1.5 has the potential to spread more diseases, it won't necessarily be very serious. However, Americans have been sluggish to get the booster jabs. Only 15% of Americans who are eligible have received an updated booster, according to CDC data. Only around 1 in 3 seniors, or those 65 and older, have had a booster shot.

Experts point out that other antivirals, like Paxlovid and Remdesivir, should still be useful even though antibody therapies won't be effective against this sublineage.

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