New COVID causing variant tracked in the US, Denmark and Israel by US CDC

On Thursday, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. said that it was tracking a new, highly mutated lineage of the COVID-19 virus.

CDC took to Twitter(X) to inform that the new lineage of the virus is named BA.2.86 and has been detected in the United States, Denmark and Israel.

“As we learn more about BA.2.86, CDC’s advice on protecting yourself from COVID-19 remains the same,” said the agency.

BA.2.86 has been classified as a “variant under monitoring” by World Health Organization (WHO) due to the large number of mutations it carries, announced the organization in a Twitter post on Thursday.

According to WHO, so far only a few sequences of the variant have been reported in a handful of countries.

This new lineage has 36 mutations (variations) from the currently dominant XBB.1.5 COVID variant. It “harkens back to an earlier branch,” explained Dr.S. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist.

However, it remains to be seen if BA.2.86 will out-compete other strains of the virus or escape immune responses from prior infection or vaccination.

Early analysis indicates that the new variant “will have equal or greater escape than XBB.1.5 from antibodies elicited by pre-Omicron and first-generation Omicron variants,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

Notably, the vaccines in upcoming COVID booster shots will be targeting the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5.