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65 million cases a week, why does the XBB variant of Covid worry China?

2023-05-24 11:13:12Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
65 million cases a week, why does the XBB variant of Covid worry China?
Covid in China

A few days ago the World Health Organization announced the end of the Covid pandemic, but Sars-CoV-2 may have other surprises in store.

A new wave is underway in China, with a peak of 65 million cases a week expected at the end of June, according to forecasts by Zhong Nanshan, an expert on respiratory diseases.

The driver of the new wave of infections are subvariants of Omicron XBB, dominant in the country, with higher transmissibility and immunity than Omicron itself, but without significant changes in pathogenicity.

Therefore, the wave should not produce the overwhelming effects on hospitals seen last winter after the abandonment of the "zero Covid" policy.

The subvariant XBB ("Gryphon") was first discovered in August 2022 and generated a series of "daughters", the latest in chronological order XBB.2.3, christened "Acrux", entered on May 18 by the WHO in the list of variants under monitoring.

Today there are two variants of interest: Kraken (XBB.1.5) which is still the most watched in the world (in 110 countries), has a downward trend for weeks; Arturo (XBB.1.16) which continues to grow and is reported in about 50 countries.

According to the WHO the available evidence does not show an increase in severity for XBB lineages.

An epidemiologic study conducted in Singapore to assess the severity of SARS-CoV-2 variants in 3,798 participants found no significant differences in outcomes of COVID-19 infection or hospitalization between lines of offspring from XBB, including Arturo and Kraken.

Furthermore, a recent laboratory study showed that XBB.1.16 and XBB.1.5 have similar immune evasion characteristics. Besides Acrux, among the variants under monitoring, because it is growing, are XBB.1.9.1 (Hyperion), XBB (Gryphon) and XBB.1.9.2.

According to the WHO, currently approved vaccines against Covid "continue to provide substantial protection against severe disease and death, which is the primary goal of vaccination" and should continue to be used. But the experts of the WHO advisory group on the composition of vaccines against Covid (Tag-Co-Vac), underline that "protection against symptomatic disease is limited and less long-lived and new vaccine formulations are needed to improve protection against symptomatic disease.

Experts point out that "lineages derived from XBB, including XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16, are highly immune elusive, with XBB.1.5 being one of the variants with the highest rate of immune evasion by neutralizing antibodies."

In the future formulations of vaccines against Covid, the experts of Tag-Co-Vac underline, that there should be the latest variants, ie lines of origin from XBB.1. China has announced that it has developed two effective vaccines against subvariants of the XBB group.

According to experts, XBB variants have characteristics of transmissibility and immunoevasion that also predict a possible increase in infections in 2-3 months.


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