Coming out of the holidays, during which time people were more likely to travel and socialize, gives any infection more room to run.
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.
“For a few months now, we haven’t seen a variant that’s taken off at that speed,” said Pavitra Roychoudhury, director of Covid-19 sequencing at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s virology lab. Trevor Bedford, a professor of computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said XBB.1.5 has a growth rate similar to that of its distant cousin BA.5.— the number of new infections expected to be caused by each infected person — at about 1.6, roughly 40% higher than its next closest competitor.
He found that XBB.1 was the slipperiest of them all. It was 63 times less likely to be neutralized by antibodies in the blood of infected and vaccinated people than BA.2 and 49 times less likely to be neutralized compared with BA.4 and BA.5. “The mutation is clearly letting XBB.1.5 spread better,” Jesse Bloom, a computational virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, wrote in an email.
“Most public health officials would have expected an increase in Covid-19 cases, even before we knew about XBB.1.5.” said Andrew Pekosz, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies viral replication. “So whether the increases in Covid cases that are occurring during the holidays are occurring because of the social interactions that people have had or whether they’re specifically related to XBB.1.5 is still something that isn’t clear.
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