Once again, here comes the next contestant ... er, variant

[edschweppe]

Oh, joy. There's a new coronavirus variant in town ... or at least in New England:

A new coronavirus variant named XBB has swiftly become the dominant form of COVID-19 spreading in the Northeast, jumping from about 35 percent of cases during the week ending Dec. 17 to just over half last week, according to CDC data.

The rapid spread indicates that the XBB variant is more adept than its predecessors at evading the immunity that comes from vaccines and infections.

"It looks like it's just going to blow the other ones away in a very short period," said Dr. Jeremy Luban, professor of molecular medicine, biochemistry, and molecular biotechnology at UMass Chan Medical School. "The most likely explanation is that it's more transmissible."

But significantly, Luban said, there is no reason to think that XBB causes more severe disease than other variants.

"So far, I don't think there's any clear evidence that any of these variants are escaping from the protection that vaccines offer against severe disease," he said. For people without conditions that compromise their immune system, he said, "as best as we can tell so far, the vaccines are still protective against severe disease."

[ ... ]

XBB, another offshoot of Omicron, was first noted by the World Health Organization in early October and showed up in the United States around mid-November. As of last week, it accounted for 18 percent of cases nationwide.

Now, XBB has spawned its own subvariants, XBB.1 and XBB.1.5.

While XBB does not seem to cause a lot of severe illness or death, little is known about the effects of XBB.1 and XBB.1.5, which have been detected in the Northeast, said Rajendram Rajnarayanan, assistant dean of research at the New York Institute of Technology, Jonesboro, Ark., campus

Yay. Keep wearing those masks, folks. Unless you really like long COVID, that is.

(I also just noticed that the Boston Globe website has put its coronavirus coverage link back on the top header. They took it down in November; I never did figure out why.)

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[edschweppe]

Front page, above the fold, in today's Globe print edition.

Maybe the Globe is starting to take COVID seriously again?