The news of variants isn’t new for us. This pandemic has also taught us greek letters among other valuable lessons. But the pertinent question is – what makes it different?
Credit: https://www.scripps.edu/
And it is the same story all over again! There have been a few months of relative calm in this pandemic. Except for a few breakouts here and there, most of the world breathed a sigh of relief as COVID-19 cases remained relatively low but it may not remain the same.
A new COVID-19 variant has been found, and it has started to spread like a wildfire.
This ‘Xe’ variant combines two distinct omicron strains and has been identified in the United Kingdom. If early reports by British public health officials and the World Health Organization are to be believed, it may easily be the fastest-spreading Covid variant.
Here’s how it is different
The news of variants isn’t new for us. This pandemic has also taught us greek letters among other valuable lessons. But the pertinent question is – what makes it different?
XE is a combination of two variants – BA.1 and BA.2.
B.A is the OG omicron, that wreaked havoc across the world with its high rate of transmission, B.A 2 was even stealthier, with a 30-50% more transmission rate than its predecessor. It’s being said that the XE variant is even more transmissible than both these variants, but only further studies can confirm that.
How did it emerge?
Recombinant viruses are particularly interesting. Blue and yellow make green. Two different strains similarly make the third one. And no, it ain’t so easy as I how I wrote it.
According to research published in the National Library of Medicine, this process helps the virus in “creating new opportunities for them to overcome selective pressures and to adapt to new environments and hosts.”
All that jazz is fine, do we need to worry? Maybe, maybe not.
Two things can determine if we should be scared of the variant – infectivity and the ability to escape the immune system. It takes some time to study how dangerous variants are. XE is a relatively new variant, it has not even been assigned a greek symbol yet but it has already started its tentacles.
It has been reported that a new variant has been reported in the UK, Canada, India, China, Thailand, the United States, Ireland, and Denmark among other countries. Early reports are not reliable to judge how dangerous it is, but we sure will know more very soon.
The New Medicine 