comment: >
  
  XBB has been around for a while. XBB.1.5 is the nasty one that looks like it has a major growth advantage that may cause problems soon.
context: I was looking for a text of this story and ran across this from NBC a month ago...
  XBB variant's arrival won't cause a new deadly COVID surge ...
  Nov 25, 2022
  You're not going to find anyone from either political party, and certainly not the business community to state the obvious. The longer the virus hangs around, the greater opportunity for strains to develop. >
  
  China is going to go through a second huge wave once their tourists bring this variant back home. >
  
  Anyone have any more than a paragraph’s worth of news on this? >
  
  While the U.S. and other countries focus on the increasing footprint of sub-subvariants of the omicron iteration of COVID-19, BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, healthcare systems here and around the world might also want to keep a wary eye on yet another sub-subvariant: XBB.
  Japanese researchers say in a preprint study posted Tuesday that XBB exhibits a unique path into existence not seen before in COVID-19 variants, and this gives it more of a “profound resistance to antiviral humoral immunity induced by breakthrough infections of prior Omicron subvariants.”
  The study, unveiled Tuesday by researchers with the University of Tokyo, bolsters that assessment, stating that “to our knowledge, this is the first documented example of a SARS-CoV-2 variant increasing its fitness through recombination rather than single mutations.”
  Recombination means the joining of variants that arise from two genetically distinct parental strains, creating opportunities for a virus to adapt to, and escape from, antibodies and other genetic roadblocks, be they produced by scientists or nature. Recombination presented a significant challenge in the early days of the fight against HIV/AIDS.
  Kevin Kavanagh, M.D., is the president and founder of the patient advocacy organization Health Watch USA and has kept a close eye on COVID-19 throughout the pandemic. Kavanagh told Fierce Healthcare that “the most disturbing finding in the study is that this virus is a recombinant virus where two different genomes or genetic materials from viruses were recombined, as opposed to a chance mutation.”
  Kavanagh pointed out that the U.S. healthcare system currently deals with the tripledemic of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and COVID-19. Kavanagh said how, in the summer, Texas Children’s Hospital had to deal with about 25 cases where children had been infected by RSV and COVID-19 at the same time.
  “If viruses can start swapping genetic material, then the sky is the limit on the number of variants and the various characteristics which may be produced,” says Kavanagh. 
  XBB is not as lethal as the delta variant, the deadliest iteration of COVID-19, but it is as lethal as BA.2.75, according to the study by Japanese researchers. The study notes that XBB first emerged in the summer in India and its neighboring countries, but health systems should not consider XBB a regional problem, and “this variant has a potential to spread worldwide in the near future.”
  XBB’s presence in the U.S. is growing rapidly and now makes up 18.3% of new cases as of the week ending Dec. 24, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a sharp increase from the week before.
  University of Tokyo researchers said that “XBB acquired two sets of a pair of immune escape-associated and infectivity-enhancing substitutions by only one recombination event. Harboring the two sets of the substitution pairs would be one of the causes why XBB shows higher Re than other Omicron subvariants. Together, although XBB emerged via a unique evolutionary pathway, our data suggest that XBB also follows the same evolutionary rule with other Omicron subvariants.”
  The R0, or R naught, estimates a pathogen’s contagiousness, accounting for biological features as well as behavior of individuals. Re is the same as R0, minus the assumption that everybody’s susceptible to infection.  
  The study said that “although various ‘local variants’ including XBB have simultaneously and convergently emerged in late 2022, local variants showing a higher transmissibility will eventually spread to the whole world, like XBB. Therefore, continued in-depth viral genomic surveillance and real-time evaluation of the risk of newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, even though considered local variants at the time of emergence, should be crucial.”
  Kavanagh stressed that a virus created through recombination “can make huge leaps and bounds in changes in its characteristics in a very short period of time. The fact that this has been observed is even more concerning than this virus itself.” >
  
  The fact the source is recombination is terrifying. I say that as a biologist. 😬 >
  
  We keep going eventually Musk may start naming kids after these variants. >
  
  As toxic as the Musk family is, we may be naming variants after the kids. >
  
  Æ XBB (is a hoax) ‘Steven’ Musk
  e: I’m not claiming it’s a hoax, but assuming it is in the eyes of fElon >
  
  Yeah but let’s hear and pay attention to that billionaire fuckstick founder of Home Despot who wants to bitch about “people not wanting to work anymore.”
  Another million will die. Millions - MILLIONS - more will develop long Covid issues. 
  People need to answer:
  What is worse, dying from Covid or ending up with PERMANENT health ailments like heart problems, etc. what are we going to end up with? A society of brain-fog fuckwits who all have serious heart problems and serious fatigue? Great job clowns that’s a wonderful goal. >
  
  I got it for the first time a few days ago, I was quad boosted, I work in a place where hundreds of people entered a day and I never got it untill this week, something is brewing. >
  
  Same here. My husband and I managed to go the entire pandemic without catching it until Christmas weekend. We’re both vaxxed and boosted but it still kicked out ass hard the first few days. I’m on day 4 and I hope we get better from here.