![]() ![]() What is surprising is how much competition XBB has as it fights to become the next dominant form of the novel-coronavirus. Changes along the spike protein have characterized most of the major new variants and subvariants of SARS-CoV-2 as the pandemic grinds toward its fourth year. This accumulation of mutations isn’t surprising. “Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most-severe disease-remains intact,” Adalja said. They won’t prevent all infections and reinfections, but they should significantly reduce the chance of severe infection potentially leading to hospitalization or death. The good news is that the new “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Pfizer and Moderna seem to work just fine against XBB, even though the original vaccines are less effective against XBB. “It is likely the most immune-evasive and poses problems for current monoclonal antibody-based treatments and prevention strategy,” Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments. It’s more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. The same subvariant just appeared in Hong Kong, too.Ī highly mutated descendant of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that drove a record wave of infections starting around a year ago, XBB is in many ways the worst form of the virus so far. ![]() New COVID-19 cases more than doubled in a day, from 4,700 on Monday to 11,700 on Tuesday-and XBB is almost certainly why. A new subvariant of the novel-coronavirus called XBB dramatically announced itself earlier this week, in Singapore. ![]()
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