A woman wears a face mask to protect against Covid-19 in London, England on April 7, 2024.
Mike Kemp | in pictures | Getty Images
LONDON – New strains of Covid-19 are spreading globally, raising concerns among health professionals four and a half years after the outbreak began.
FLiRT variants — the label derived from the names of mutations in the variants’ genetic code — are on the rise in the US and Europe as the coronavirus continues to mutate from earlier strains.
The new grouping is a variant of the previously dominant JN.1, native offspring of Omicron. Currently there is little evidence that the new strains are more severe, but they appear to have less of the same set of mutations independently; basis For the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, KP.2 is now the dominant strain in the US. The tension is calculated. 28.2% of all cases In the two weeks until May 11, it increased from 3.8% at the end of March, shortly after the tension was first detected.
KP.1.1, another variant of FLiRT, accounted for 7.1 percent of current infections, the agency said.
Cases are also increasing in Europe, with the new variant now found in 14 countries.
World Health Organization in it Latest update Earlier this month, he said cases were limited in all reporting countries. However, individual countries are showing “slight increases in very low-level investigations”.
Last week, the UK Health Protection Agency he said. It continues to monitor data related to new variants in the UK and internationally, assessing their severity and continued vaccine effectiveness. “There are currently no changes to the broad public health advisory,” the agency said in an update.
Jennifer Horney, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Delaware, said it seems unlikely that the new strains will cause a major wave of infections, as has been seen in the past. But she said the new species will change things dramatically in the coming summer months.
“While our idea of what a wave of COVID-19 infections will look like has changed over the course of the outbreak, these new strains could lead to an increase in the number of cases in the U.S. over the next few months,” Horney told CNBC in an email.
“Many of them will be benign, depending on our immune system, not changes in circulation,” she said.
Still, health experts will be watching closely to see how effective existing vaccines are against the new strains.
Next month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines Advisory Committee will meet to discuss this winter’s Covid-19 vaccine recommendations. Postponed A previous discussion to gather more information.