Five years after the initial outbreak, the COVID-19 virus continues to evolve, with the XEC variant emerging as a potential dominant strain. This latest variant, with its new mutations, has raised concerns among scientists despite the ongoing protection offered by vaccines.
It has been five years since a new strain of coronavirus was identified. The world changed drastically on Tuesday, January 7, 2020 when a group of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with a virus no one had ever seen before. The event triggered a pandemic that shut businesses and forced governments to deal quickly with a deadly emerging virus. The virus is still present, but humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections.
Coronavirus is less lethal than it was at the start of the pandemic and no longer tops the list of leading causes of death. However, the virus is evolving, necessitating close monitoring by scientists. Which Covid variant is dominating now? Genetic changes called mutations happen as viruses make copies of themselves and this virus has proven to be no different. The delta variant became the prevalent strain in June 2021, sparking concern due to its high hospitalisation rates - double that of the virus's original strain. In late November 2021, another variant, omicron, emerged. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that omicron tends to cause less severe illness than the delta variant, which might be attributed to increased immunity from vaccinations and past infections. Fast forward to June 2024, cases of the XEC variant emerged in the UK and several other countries. It was originally identified in Germany and has some new mutations but vaccines should still help prevent severe cases Prof Francois Balloux, Director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, told BBC News that XEC may become the dominant subvariant over the winter. “It spread very rapidly,” dominating within weeks, said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas. “It drove a huge spike in cases compared to anything we had seen previously. “Ever since then, we just sort of keep seeing these different subvariants of omicron accumulating more different mutation
COVID-19 XEC Variant Omicron Mutations Vaccines
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