{"id":3125,"date":"2023-04-04T18:52:53","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T23:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3125"},"modified":"2023-04-04T18:58:36","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T23:58:36","slug":"what-to-know-about-the-new-xbb-1-16-covid-19-variant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/04\/04\/what-to-know-about-the-new-xbb-1-16-covid-19-variant\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Know About the New XBB.1.16 COVID-19 Variant"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Time<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Health Organization (WHO) is monitoring a new COVID-19 subvariant called XBB.1.16, which has been circulating throughout India for a few months and is causing a new surge of cases there. The Times of India<\/em><\/a> reported on Apr. 3 that more than 3,600 new COVID cases had been recorded in the country since the previous day, marking India\u2019s largest single-day jump in case numbers in more than six months. \u201cIn India, XBB.1.16 has replaced the other variants that are in circulation,\u201d said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO\u2019s COVID-19 technical lead, during a Mar. 29 press conference<\/a>. \u201cSo this is one to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

XBB.1.16 is one of more than 600 Omicron subvariants that are currently circulating, according to WHO. It\u2019s similar to the\u00a0XBB.1.5 variant<\/a>\u00a0that has dominated the U.S. throughout 2023 but is distinguished by a mutation in the spike protein that \u201cmay give it some additional growth advantages,\u201d says Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children\u2019s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. In lab studies, this additional mutation \u201cshows increased infectivity, as well as potential increased pathogenicity,\u201d Van Kerkhove said. \u201cIt has potential changes that we need to keep a good eye out on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far, XBB.1.16 has been found primarily in India and Nepal, where\u00a0at least 10 cases were confirmed<\/a>\u00a0on Apr. 3. But, as we\u2019ve seen with past variants, things can change quickly, Hotez says. Take XBB.1.5, which accounted for less than a quarter of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. going into late December last year. \u201cOver the ensuing week, XBB.1.5 became the dominant variant,\u201d says Hotez. If the new variant reaches the U.S., \u201cthe question is whether XBB.1.16 is going to do the same, or whether the two are [closely related] enough.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, a new variant\u2014even one ratcheting up case numbers\u2014is not by itself cause for alarm. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen a change in severity in individuals or in populations,\u201d Van Kerkhove said. Despite the increase in cases, reported hospitalizations and deaths in India have remained low, says Dr. Monica Gandhi, associate division chief at UC San Francisco\u2019s Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine, and Indian health officials have responded to the new dominant variant by recommending additional boosters for people over 65 or who are immunocompromised and otherwise vulnerable. Right now, many countries have high population level immunity, so boosting those who are vulnerable at the outset of a wave of cases is a reliable and repeatable strategy, she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAny new subvariant of Omicron, it\u2019s not fazing us,\u201d Gandhi says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t change [the WHO\u2019s] baseline recommendation, which is to boost older and vulnerable people. There is a possibility that we get really unlucky and we get a worse variant, and then we would boost everyone, but the reason that we know this is not what XBB.1.16 is is that it\u2019s causing the expected rise in cases without a high rise in hospitalizations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been a year since WHO released their\u00a0plan<\/a>\u00a0for how the world will get out of the emergency phase of the pandemic, which included three possible paths. Even with the emergence and spread of variants like XBB.1.16, Gandhi says that the world is still on the best-case scenario path, in which new variants continue to appear but don\u2019t cause outbreaks with high occurrences of severe disease and hospitalizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though XBB.1.16 is not currently among the Omicron variants accounting for U.S. infections<\/a>, Hotez believes it\u2019s time for public health officials to consider authorizing another booster for vulnerable populations who were among the first to receive the bivalent boosters back in September 2022. \u201cI\u2019m a little puzzled about why we\u2019ve not heard from the FDA or CDC about that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the virus continues to evolve, Hotez is most concerned about the \u201cdismantlement\u201d of independent tracking efforts that the U.S. has relied on to spot and monitor new variants before they become dominant. \u201cI think we\u2019re letting our guard down,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time The World Health Organization (WHO) is monitoring a new COVID-19 subvariant called XBB.1.16, which has been circulating throughout India for a few months and is causing a new surge of cases there. The Times of India reported on Apr. 3 that more than 3,600 new COVID cases had been recorded in the country since the previous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid","category-emerging-infectious-diseases"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3126,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3125\/revisions\/3126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}