COVID Omicron XBB

MANILA – The Department of Health (DOH) on Wednesday warned the public against the dissemination of inaccurate information on Omicron XBB subvariant ...

The DOH also urged the public to source information only from legitimate sources and platforms. It urged the public to consult a physician or to head to the nearest health facility for the proper diagnosis of symptoms. To help prevent the further transmission of Covid-19, the public is advised to continue observing proper sanitation, masking, distancing, good ventilation and getting vaccinated.

The latest Omicron variant is making scientists take notice in the US - so what do you need to know?

Omicron has outperformed the earlier Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta coronavirus variants since emerging in late 2021. [to share clinical information on people infected in order to see how the variant behaves](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-64131713) in a non-immune population," Prof Heymann said. But he said it was unlikely to cause major problems in countries like the UK which have high levels of vaccination and previous infections. NHS England has said the fears of a "twindemic" of Covid and flu have already been realised, [Wellcome Sanger](https://covid19.sanger.ac.uk/lineages/raw?lineageView=1&lineageSearch=xbb&lineages=A%2CB%2CB.1.1.7%2CB.1.617.2%2CB.1.1.529%2CBA.1.1%2CBA.2%2CBA.4%2CBA.5%2CXBB%2CXBB.1%2CXBB.1.5&colours=7%2C3%2C1%2C6%2C2%2C8%2C4%2C0%2C5%2C0%2C1%2C) suggested that one in 25 Covid cases in the UK were XBB.1.5. Prof Barclay said she expected more hospitalisations in the UK if the variant takes off here, "as we expect it to do". [nearly 28% of Covid cases in the US in the first week of January were caused by XBB.1.5](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) The UK Health Security Agency is due to release a report on variants spreading in the UK next week. "A bit of the genome from one virus gets joined up with another bit from a second virus, and they merge, and that goes on to transmit." [similar to those of previous Omicron strains](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54145299). The Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge is sequencing at least 5,000 Covid samples a week, as part of continuing efforts to track variants. A new Covid sub-variant is causing some concern in the US, where it is spreading rapidly.

The CDC estimates that XBB.1.5 has more than doubled its share of the Covid-19 pie each week for the last four, rising from about 4% to 41% of new ...

“There’s so much more immunity in the population that I don’t think that it’s going to take off.” “They still provide a level of immunity that may not prevent you from getting infected but may have a significant impact on whether or not you become seriously ill and die,” he said. David Ho, professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, recently tested viruses engineered to have the spikes of XBB and XBB.1 as well as BQ.1 and BQ 1.1 in his lab against antibodies from the blood of people who’d been infected, who were vaccinated with the original and new bivalent vaccines, and who’d been both infected and vaccinated. [Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. In addition to being highly immune evasive, XBB.1.5 has an additional trick up its sleeve that seems to be helping to fuel its growth. “Most public health officials would have expected an increase in Covid-19 cases, even before we knew about XBB.1.5.” said Andrew Pekosz, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies viral replication. For all the recent concern that a new Covid-19 threat could come from China’s ongoing surge, experts point out that XBB.1.5 appears to have arisen in the United States. He found that XBB.1 was the slipperiest of them all. XBB drove a wave of cases in Singapore this fall but never gained much ground in the US. “I expect it to drive increased circulation in the coming weeks,” Bedford wrote in an email. In the Northeast, the CDC estimates, XBB.1.5 is causing 75% of new cases. “So I’d look to hospitalizations in the vulnerable age groups [such as seniors] as better indicator of wave,” he wrote.

There remains no cases of the more contagious Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 in the Philippines, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Tuesday, Jan. 3.

Most of the new cases were still recorded in the National Capital Region with 2,906. “To date, there are currently no cases of XBB.1.5 detected in the country,” the DOH said in a statement. There remains no cases of the more contagious Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 in the Philippines, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Tuesday, Jan.

MANILA, Philippines—New year, new COVID-19 variant? Scientists and health experts have recently expressed concern over the new variant of SARS-CoV-2, ...

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) has yet to add it to its VOCs and Omicron sub-variants under monitoring. The US CDC and Gregory said that it is not yet known whether the XBB.1.5 can cause more severe illness. Scientists and health experts have recently expressed concern over the new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which is quickly spreading across the United States. Epidemiologist and health economist Dr. The XBB.1.5, according to Canadian evolutionary and genome biologist T. “The DOH assures the public that the government continues to implement COVID-19 surveillance and monitoring activities and is confident in detecting potential variants that may enter the country,” DOH said in a statement. Feigl-Ding explained that across four US states where XBB.1.5 is the dominant variant—New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey—hospitalizations had been steadily increasing. In a series of Twitter posts, Topol, Weiland, and Gregory pointed out that the new XBB.1.5 variant evolved from the Omicron XBB or XBB.1 variant in the US, specifically in New York, where hospitalizations have been rising. The US CDC had already added the new XBB.1.5 variant on its list of Variants of Concern (VOC). [INQUIRER.net](http://inquirer.net/) will detail what scientists and health experts know so far about the new XBB.1.5 variant, which is believed to be responsible for increasing infections and hospitalizations across the US. Ryan Gregory, is the fifth descendant of the Omicron XBB.1 variant, which stemmed from the XBB variant—a recombinant variant between two BA.2 lineages (BA.2.10.11 and BA.2.75.3.1.1.1). By December 31, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that cases of the XBB.1.5 variant had doubled, accounting for 40.5 percent of total COVID-19 infections across the US.

The new XBB.1.5 variant, which now accounts for 40.5 percent of all sequenced COVID-19 infections in the US, rose to dominance more quickly than any other ...

The lifting of Zero-COVID in China and the adoption of a “forever COVID” policy marks a new and potentially even more dangerous stage in the pandemic. The year 2022 witnessed a significant growth of the class struggle globally, which will continue in the coming year. This must be connected to the conscious struggle against the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the threat of nuclear war, the deepening climate crisis, and all the immense social problems created by world capitalism. The relentless propaganda campaign in the West itself had an impact within China, where sections of the middle class and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bureaucracy became increasingly convinced that Omicron was “mild” and Zero-COVID had to be scrapped. The world’s capitalist ruling elites are playing Russian roulette with society, raising the danger that a more infectious, immune-resistant and deadly variant could unleash an even more lethal global wave of infections. The CDC has a rule which stipulates that any variant that accounts for over one percent of sequenced cases must be reported, a rule they violated for nearly a month in December and September-October. On December 30, Walensky broke her silence with a tweet stating, “We can’t stop the spread of #COVID19.” She praised the CDC’s new policy requiring that all travelers from China must test negative for COVID-19 within two days of flying to the US. They estimate that by the end of January, XBB.1.5 will account for over 75 percent of all infections throughout the US, at which point the nationwide surge will be in full swing. Masses of people could be infected or reinfected with COVID-19, causing spikes in hospitalizations and deaths, compounding damage to the overall health of the population. There is no innocent explanation for the CDC cover-ups in December or October, which were clearly deliberate and intended to prevent any public alarm that might disrupt the holiday shopping and travel season. [reported CDC data](https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1608704548536975360) that was leaked to him showing that XBB.1.5 was already dominant in the US. This age group already accounts for over 90 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the US.

XBB.1.5, a new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, is spreading in the U.S. and may start a wave of new infection and reinfections.

[published](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2214293) in the New England Journal of Medicine (and based on a small number of people) suggests that while XBB is more immune-evasive than previous versions of the virus, people who have received the [updated bivalent booster](https://time.com/6236289/bivalent-booster-effective-data-shows/) are better protected against it than those who have not. ages 5 and older have gotten a bivalent booster, [according to the CDC](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-booster-percent-pop5), which means many people are currently not as protected as they could be against the new variant. But if XBB.1.5 spreads widely, even a small percentage of people developing long-term complications [could mean lots of new Long COVID cases](https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1609928349551403010). [according to data](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) from the U.S. To do that, follow all the usual advice: stay up-to-date on vaccines and boosters, wear a [almost 40% of tests are now coming back positive](https://www.walgreens.com/healthcare-solutions/covid-19-index), though it’s not possible to say how many of those infections were due to XBB.1.5. This raises the risk of reinfection, a World Health Organization group [warned in October](https://www.who.int/news/item/27-10-2022-tag-ve-statement-on-omicron-sublineages-bq.1-and-xbb)—though the group said at the time that XBB does not appear to cause significantly more severe disease than previous strains. The recent Cell study found that these therapies largely did not work against XBB, which suggests the same may be true for XBB.1.5. [Watch All of the 2023 Oscar Nominees](https://time.com/6249739/where-to-watch-stream-2023-oscar-nominees/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230125) Research recently Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [reinfections](https://time.com/6232103/covid-19-reinfections-effects/) to start the new year.

The Department of Health says the country has not yet detected any case of the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which is feared to potentially drive a new ...

The WHO does not have any data yet on the severity of XBB.1.5, but there's no indication it makes people sicker than previous subvariants, top official ...

But Van Kerkhove said China is not sharing enough sequencing data from around the vast country. "It's not just a matter of knowing what variants are circulating," Van Kerkhove said. "The more this virus circulates the more opportunities it will have to change," Van Kerkhove said. "It is the most transmissible subvariant that has been detected yet," Van Kerkhove told reporters during a press conference in Geneva on Wednesday. and global health officials have said Beijing is not sharing enough data on the surge with the international community. The WHO's advisory group that tracks Covid variants is conducting a risk assessment on XBB.1.5 that it will publish in the coming days, she said. A growing number of countries, including the U.S., are requiring airline passengers from China to test negative for Covid before boarding their flights. As XBB.1.5 rapidly spreads in the U.S., China is battling a surge of cases and hospitalizations after abandoning its zero-Covid policy in response to social unrest late last year. The number of people infected with XBB.1.5 has been doubling in the U.S. is the most contagious version of Covid-19 yet, but it doesn't appear to make people sicker, according to the World Health Organization. But XBB.1.5 has a mutation that Tracking Covid variants has become difficult as genomic sequencing declines across the world, she said.

The new Omicron subvariant suddenly making up 40 per cent of cases in the U.S. may be better at evading antibodies than previous variants, according to some ...

[Sci-Tech](https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech) [Bear on Mars? senators call for trade crackdown on Canada over dairy quotas, digital policies](https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/u-s-senators-call-for-trade-crackdown-on-canada-over-dairy-quotas-digital-policies-1.6249216) mom records police handcuffing 12-year-old in hospital](https://bc.ctvnews.ca/this-is-too-much-b-c-mom-records-police-handcuffing-12-year-old-in-hospital-1.6250130) Leger and The Association for Canadian Studies surveyed 1,554 Canadian adults over a two-day period in January. Capitol was sentenced Friday to more than six years in prison for using pepper spray to assault police officers, one of whom died a day after the siege. 8 storming of government buildings in the capital by far-right protesters. Several teams released statements of support for the family, as did the National Basketball Players Association. In one test looking at the serum samples of participants who received a bivalent booster shot, the level of neutralization was 12 to 26 times lower in XBB and BQ.1.1 compared to the original 2020 strain, and “neutralizing activity was lowest against the XBB subvariant”. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). in New York and Connecticut in late October, according to the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data, an international organization that aims to track and sequence variants. This means that the two variants exchanged genetic material to create a new version that carries aspects of both, something that can occur when two different variants co-infect the same cell. At the beginning of December, Omicron sub variant XBB.1.5 made up just 1.3 per cent of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S.

XBB.1.5 is a highly transmissible subvariant of omicron and is now the dominant Covid variant in the U.S. after just a matter of months.

[15%](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home) of those eligible have gotten an updated dose. “Awareness is different from panic, so I think people should be aware that there is this on top of the other stuff circulating, but it is not necessarily something to panic about.” Although cases are on the rise, when [wastewater surveillance data](https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/surveillance/wastewater-surveillance/wastewater-surveillance.html) is analyzed, the concentration of the virus “is not nearly as high as it was” during the BA.1 surge of the winter of 2021, according to Roychoudhury. “We’re facing a more transmissible variant, but we’ve also faced transmissible variants in the past,” Roychoudury said. Those who aren’t up-to-date on their vaccines are more likely to experience “the more severe symptoms.” The more up-to-date a person is, the less severe their symptoms are projected to be. “We know how to deal with these, but it is winter, so we do expect to see this kind of thing happen.” However, the government has faced a challenge with getting people to receive updated boosters. The public’s “best defense against severe illness” is the bivalent vaccine, Roychoudury said. According to Roychoudhury, the variant is a recombinant strain of omicron. “We're seeing more people actually just have cold-like symptoms”—a runny nose, congestion, sore throat and cough—“less likely to have those flu-like, really feeling very sick [symptoms, like] the high fevers." Allison Arwady, the Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner It was first found in the U.S. after just a matter of months.

The latest Omicron variant is making scientists take notice in the US - so what do you need to know?

Omicron has outperformed the earlier Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta coronavirus variants since emerging in late 2021. [to share clinical information on people infected in order to see how the variant behaves](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-64131713) in a non-immune population," Prof Heymann said. But he said it was unlikely to cause major problems in countries like the UK which have high levels of vaccination and previous infections. NHS England has said the fears of a "twindemic" of Covid and flu have already been realised, [Wellcome Sanger](https://covid19.sanger.ac.uk/lineages/raw?lineageView=1&lineageSearch=xbb&lineages=A%2CB%2CB.1.1.7%2CB.1.617.2%2CB.1.1.529%2CBA.1.1%2CBA.2%2CBA.4%2CBA.5%2CXBB%2CXBB.1%2CXBB.1.5&colours=7%2C3%2C1%2C6%2C2%2C8%2C4%2C0%2C5%2C0%2C1%2C) suggested that one in 25 Covid cases in the UK were XBB.1.5. Prof Barclay said she expected more hospitalisations in the UK if the variant takes off here, "as we expect it to do". [nearly 28% of Covid cases in the US in the first week of January were caused by XBB.1.5](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) The UK Health Security Agency is due to release a report on variants spreading in the UK next week. "A bit of the genome from one virus gets joined up with another bit from a second virus, and they merge, and that goes on to transmit." [similar to those of previous Omicron strains](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54145299). The Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge is sequencing at least 5,000 Covid samples a week, as part of continuing efforts to track variants. A new Covid sub-variant is causing some concern in the US, where it is spreading rapidly.

The World Health Organization has started studying the new variant's risks and asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do the same.

The WHO’s own technical advisory group on virus evolution is also working on a risk assessment, which is expected to be released in the coming days. But it’s too soon to conclude whether the new variant is responsible for the uptick, she said. XBB.1.5 has “rapidly replaced other variants” in some European countries and in the Northeast U.S., where it comprises the vast majority of infections, according to Van Kerkhove. So far, it’s been identified in more than 25 countries. As of Friday, XBB.1.5 was responsible for an estimated 75% of cases in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s regions 1 and 2, which include Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. So far, however, there is no evidence that the new strain will cause illness worse than other Omicron variants. Given the prevalence of XBB.1.5 in the U.S., the WHO has asked the CDC to report on the risks of the new variant. XBB.1.5, first identified in October, is a combination of two spinoffs of BA.2, “stealth Omicron.” In addition to the U.S., levels of the new variant are rapidly rising in Europe, WHO officials said. Other respiratory viruses, like RSV and flu, are also circulating in the area, and a rise in COVID cases would be expected after holiday celebrations, regardless of a new variant appearing, she added. The Northeast U.S.—where XBB.1.5 is responsible for most sequenced COVID cases—is seeing increasing hospitalizations, Van Kerkhove said. New COVID variant ‘Kraken’ XBB.1.5 is on track to become dominant in the U.S., and experts are worried

XBB.1.5 has been nicknamed the "kraken" variant, because like a mythical sea monster, it's picked up some impressive and scary features.

"Pretty good protection against XBB in terms of hospitalization and death, probably not much of anything to preventing infection." Swartzberg called that a "wonderful shock" given the holidays and all the indoor gathering that's been going on this winter. [as bad as Delta was](https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-is-like-covid-19-on-steroids-expert-says-2021-7)," he said. Practically, this could make the virus better at spreading and infecting us than the original XBB. At the very least, it'll likely cocirculate for a while with other variants. In Northeastern states, including Connecticut and Vermont, XBB.1.5 has essentially taken over: It accounts for more than 75% of new reported cases, according to the estimates. [overall](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklycases_select_00) in the US and [in the Northeast](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily), where XBB.1.5 is [most prevalent](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions). "It's doing pretty well right now," Andy Rothstein, a computational biologist, told Insider. John Swartzberg, an infectious-disease expert and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health, told Insider. Experts were [airport-testing and -sequencing program](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#traveler-genomic-surveillance) for [Concentric by Ginkgo](https://www.epidemictracker.com/), a biosecurity division of the Boston biotech company, said the XBB.1.5 variant had two things in its arsenal giving it a competitive advantage: It is more contagious and more immune-evasive than other versions of Omicron. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) estimates, XBB.1.5 is now responsible for more than 40% of all COVID-19 cases in the US — a dramatic climb from where it stood just a month ago, when it accounted for less than 4% of cases.

Health experts voiced concern Wednesday over the rapid growth of the new Omicron sublineage XBB.1.5, advising the public to stay informed but not alarmed as ...

[Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. But he said it’s still not clear whether it causes more severe disease, something that was also stressed by Van Kerkhove. “And if we all do our part,” he wrote, “We can reduce the impact it will have on our lives.” “We will soon have more data on how well vaccines neutralize XBB.1.5,” Jha said, suggesting that research to determine vaccine effectiveness against the new sublineage is underway. Van Kerkhove noted that XBB.1.5, which was first detected in the United States, has spread to at least 29 countries and “is the most transmissible form of Omicron to date.” Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images