Kraken Covid

ESR reported the whole genome sequencing results for two COVID-19 cases with XBB.1.5 late last week.

The XBB.1.5 variant of COVID-19, also known as Kraken, has been detected by whole genome sequencing in New Zealand., , The Institute of Environmental ...

It remains unknown how XBB1.5 will compete against other variants in a New Zealand context, and whether this could affect the level of COVID-19 circulating in the community in the coming months. So far, most Omicron variants have not demonstrated a change in severity of the disease, and there is no evidence at this stage to indicate XBB.1.5 causes more severe disease compared to other variants. XBB.1.5 appears to be outcompeting other XBB sub-lineages and BQ.1.1 in the USA. Many of these new subvariants are identified by their mutations, but it can take weeks or months to determine whether these mutations will allow a subvariant to out-compete others circulating in the community. You can have the medicine delivered by friends, whānau or the pharmacy’s delivery service. At the early stage of a new variant being identified in New Zealand, it is difficult to predict whether and when it will become established in the community.

The official names for variants and subvariants—names such as SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7—come from the Pango naming system, which was fashioned by evolutionary ...

We’re not just arguing about the pandemic; we’re arguing about how to argue about the pandemic. Hardly anything about the pandemic has been a matter of universal agreement, but the present nomenclatural free-for-all seems to have taken us somewhere even more splintered, even more anarchic. This is certainly preferable to the sudden and unexpected emergence of a dangerous, drastically different variant. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist at Canada’s University of Guelph who is one of the leaders of a small, informal group of scientists that have taken it upon themselves to name the many subvariants that the WHO does not deem worthy of a new Greek letter. “If there is a new variant that requires public communication and discourse,” Jasarevic told me, “it would be designated a new variant of concern and assigned a new label.” Seven different Omicron sublineages now account for at least 2 percent of all infections, and none accounts for more than about 40 percent (though [XBB.1.5](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/01/latest-covid-omicron-subvariant-xbb15/672646/) is threatening to overwhelm its competitors). They’re trying to make the process more formal, but Gregory would prefer that the WHO take over and standardize the process. It’s great news that the ways in which the coronavirus has been mutating recently haven’t been significant enough to produce a whole new, widespread, and possibly far more worrisome version of itself that the world has to contend with. As baffling as they can seem, they follow a clear logic: Under the system, B refers to a particular COVID lineage, B.1 refers to the sublineage of B lineage, B.1.1 refers to the first sublineage of the B.1 sublineage, and so on. Unofficial epithets have come and gone throughout the pandemic—remember [“stealth Omicron”](https://www.nytimes.com/article/omicron-variant-ba2.html) and the [“Frankenstein variant”](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/23/1088236568/when-2-coronavirus-variants-meet-inside-1-person-a-frankenstein-hybrid-can-be-bo)?—but these new ones are on another level of weirdness. These official names do not exactly roll off the tongue or stick in the memory, which became a problem when new variants of concern started to arise and the world began groping for ways to talk about them. The official names for variants and subvariants—names such as SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7—come from the Pango naming system, which was fashioned by evolutionary biologists in the early months of the pandemic to standardize variant-naming practices.