The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 variant dashboard revealed a new dark horse that could soon sweep the field
For weeks, scientists have been watching a slew of Omicron descendants duke it out for dominance of Covid-19 transmission in the United States, with the BQs – BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 – seeming to edge out all the others to claim a slight lead. The result has been a gradual rise in cases and hospitalizations that never seemed to reach the peaks of this summer’s BA.5 wave and was certainly nothing like the tsunami of illness caused by the original Omicron strain a year ago.
In terms of immune evasion, Ho says, these variants have shifted as far away from the antibodies we have made to use against them as the original Omicron variant was from the Covid-19 viruses that preceded it roughly a year ago. He calls these levels of immune evasion “alarming” and said they could further compromise the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines. His findings were recently published in the journal Cell. Ho said Monday that XBB.1.5 was the same story in terms of antibody evasion as XBB.
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