COVID-19 Cases Are Picking Up Again — These Are the Variants That Health Officials Are Watching
From Stratus to Cicada, several variants are on the radar as COVID-19 activity rises, impacting how the virus spreads, its severity, and how it interacts with the immune system.
As the colder months of infectious disease season approach, cases of common respiratory illnesses are already beginning to rise. With COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) constantly evolving, health authorities face challenges in anticipating changes with each new winter season. Currently, the number of positive COVID-19 tests in the United States is on the rise again, prompting health professionals to closely monitor the dominant variants circulating globally.
To understand a virus's behavior and how effectively medical treatments can combat it, public health agencies assess the variant profile of a prominent virus. Although a regular COVID-19 test cannot identify the specific variant responsible for an infection, monitoring genomic sequencing of a percentage of positive clinical samples provides valuable insights into variant trends within the community, according to Nebraska Medicine.
At present, several COVID-19 variants are active, with the SW.2 virus making up approximately 21 percent of reported cases worldwide, the Stratus variant (XFG) accounting for 16 percent, and the BA.3.2 variant, also known as the Cicada variant, posing a potential threat. Despite its mutation profile making it more likely to evade vaccine immunity, the BA.3.2 variant's case numbers are currently low, representing around 2 percent of total infections.
The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to actively track the global appearance of this variant.
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