COVID-19 Pandemic

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The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are tracking a newly identified, highly mutated strain of COVID experts warn could be the next big leap in viral evolution—if the variant takes off.

And on Friday, the U.K. Health Security Agency (HSA) said that the variant had been identified in England, and that it was “assessing the situation.” The patient ill with BA.2.86 is elderly and hospitalized, Raj Rajnarayanan—assistant dean of research and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro, Ark., and a top COVID-variant tracker—told Fortune.

BA.2.86, on the other hand, features 30 or more mutations that separate it from other Omicron—mutations with the potential to make it considerably more immune-evasive, and able to more easily infect cells, according to Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, Wash., and top variant tracker.

“What sets this one apart from the many other Omicron subvariants is that it exhibits a large number of mutations … far more than we usually see,” Ryan Gregory, a biology professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told Fortune.

Though the highly mutated variant is “quite divergent” from other known circulating strains, “it’s unclear whether it will have a significant effect on the number of severe cases or our management/prevention strategies,” he told Fortune.

Three main questions remain: how the variant’s mutations will affect symptoms and severity, if it will take off anywhere (or everywhere), and how new XBB.1.5 COVID vaccines—slated for U.S. release in September—might hold up (in addition to our existing immunity).

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