The EG.5 'Eris' variant is now the dominant COVID-19 strain in the U.S. Here's what to know about transmission and symptoms.
, started circulating in the U.S. earlier this spring. Last month, EG.5 quickly overtook the prevailing omicron XBB subvariants, which had been driving the largest share of cases in the country.
So far, EG.5 has been reported in 51 countries and there has been a steady increase in prevalence globally — the majority of sequences are from China, followed by the U.S., South Korea, Japan and Canada, per WHO. "If it was equally transmissible, then we wouldn't see it gaining strength number-wise compared to some of the other variants," says Nachman, adding that EG.5 quickly pushed out other XBB variants in the U.S., which were dominant over the summer.“Whether it's escaping population immunity or it has some intrinsic factor that makes it better able to transmit from one person to another ... it’s hard to separate,” he adds.
According to CDC estimates, EG.5 accounted for about 17% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. during the two-week period ending on Aug. 3. — after EG.5, the next most common variants were XBB.1.16, XBB.2.3, and XBB.1.5, which accounted for 15%, 11% and 10% of cases, respectively. In its risk assessment of EG.5, WHO said,"There have been no reported changes in disease severity to date."of the year, there isn't evidence that EG.5 is causing this uptick or that it's more likely to cause hospitalizations in general, Nachman notes.
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