<
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/new-covid-variant-eg-5-surge-mask>
'A highly infectious, new COVID variant is spreading fast, barely three months
after the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was no longer a
global health emergency.
EG.5, a descendant of a previous XBB strain of Omicron, was first spotted in
Indonesia on February 17 and has been spreading steadily since. Infections
began surging in mid-June—when a record-breaking number of summer travelers
took to the skies and unprecedented high temperatures around the Northern
Hemisphere forced people to gather indoors, enabling the virus to spread
easily. That alarmed the WHO and led them to elevate EG.5 to a "variant of
interest" on August 9, alongside other highly contagious Omicron variants such
as XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16.
"Based on the experience that we have from the previous waves, we can project
EG.5 is definitely a big deal," says Rajendram Rajnarayanan, a computational
biologist at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro,
Arkansas.
In the United States, EG.5 is now the most prevalent strain of SARS-CoV-2 and
has replaced other XBB variants (XBB.1.5, XBB.1.16, XBB.1.9), according to data
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This variant is now
causing more than 17 percent of all reported COVID-19 cases in the country. The
number of hospitalizations has risen by 12.5 percent in the past week to
roughly 9,000 cases.
EG.5 is also causing upticks in COVID-19 cases worldwide. The number of new
COVID cases between July 10 to August 6—nearly 1.5 million—is 80 percent higher
compared to the previous 28 days. EG.5 has also been spotted in at least 51
other countries including in those with high vaccination rates: Canada, Japan,
South Korea, and China.
"We should take all of these subvariants very seriously," says Angela
Rasmussen, a virologist at Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in
Saskatoon, Canada.
Using testing kits, when symptoms suggest it could be COVID-19, and masking up
and staying home if COVID positive, can slow the spread of the new variant,
says Rajnarayanan. “We need to minimize the spread of the virus as much as we
can."'
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: August 17, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-87826252
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
