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This story appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.
The Northern Hemisphere is entering a new wave of Covid: while much of the world acts as if the pandemic is over, cases are surging again. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a report on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The U. S. has recorded a slight increase in positive Covid cases. tests, emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths in recent weeks, while cases and hospitalizations are also emerging in the United Kingdom.
But it is in Japan where the increase is especially visible. The country’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases reported that the average number of infected people in a medical facility has risen rapidly since June. Notably, Okinawa Prefecture has recorded the highest number of recently hospitalized patients since reports began, and it is conceivable that the virus is spreading in Japan at a faster rate than the last two primary waves in the country, in September 2023 and January 2024.
The culprits for this increase are a new set of variants: KP. 3, LB. 1 and KP. 2. 3. Descendants of the Omicron JN. 1 sublineage that took over at Christmas, are the reason for new infections around the world. world, and KP. 3 seems to be gaining dominance. As of July 15, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)The U. S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that about 37% of new Covid cases in the United States were due to KP. 3, while KP. 2 accounted for 24% and LB. 1, which represents 15%. KP. 3, has noticed an immediate increase in recent months: as of May 11, it accounted for about 9% of cases in the United States; A month later, on June 11, its percentage was 25%.
Together, those viruses are called FLiRT variants, because they all have a mutation in the spike protein that changes their amino acid 456 from phenylalanine (F) to leucine (L) and their amino acid 346 from arginine (R) to threonine. ). According to an article by the Institute of Medical Sciences of the University of Tokyo, published this year in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, these variants are more transmissible than the classic variants of the past and have a great ability to evade neutralizing antibodies.
Genotype to Phenotype Japan (G2P-Japan), a consortium of studies at the institute, believes that the R-numbers of FLiRT variants (the average number of new cases caused by an inflamed user and a measure of infectivity) are higher for those new forms. In addition, when the infectivity of those viruses was assessed in cultured cells, KP. 3 required a smaller amount of virus to cause infection compared to LB. 1 and KP. 2. 3, either of which required about the same amount of virus as JN. 1. These effects give insight into why KP. 3 is heading toward dominance.
The FLiRT variants, added to KP. 3, also outpace the ability of the virus’s previous bureaucracy to evade immunity. When the G2P-Japan team examined beyond infections, breakthrough infections (those that follow vaccination), and neutralizing antibody responses induced by the updated XBB. 1. 5 Covid vaccine, they found that in all cases, the neutralizing activity opposite FLiRTs was particularly lower than that of FLiRTs. which opposes existing epidemic variants.
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