Japan has reported its first case of omicron XE, a new strain first detected in the U.K.
The woman in her 30s arrived at the airport from the U.S. on March 26. Japan's health ministry said the woman was not sick.
According to the U.K. Health Security Agency, cases of the new strain have almost doubled in Britain.
There were 1,125 cases of XE identified in the U.K. as of April 5. The specimen date of the earliest confirmed case suggests it could have been in circulation for several months.
Thailand, India and Israel have been detected. The cases may have developed on their own. The US has yet to report any XE cases.
A type of variant that can occur when an individual gets two or more infections at the same time is known as a recombinant, or XE.
There is a mix of the previously highly infectious omicron BA.1 strain, which emerged in late 2021, and the newer Stealth BA.2 variant, currently the U.K.
Several times during the course of the coronaviruses pandemic, there have been such recombinants. Health experts say it's too soon to draw conclusions about the new subvariant's ability to evade vaccines.
Meera Chand, director of clinical and emerging infections at UKHSA, said in a statement that they continue to monitor cases of the recombinant XE variant in the U.K., which currently represents a very small proportion of cases.
On Sunday, the U.K. reported 41,469 new Covid cases, with a seven-day average of 59,578 cases. The percentage of total Covid cases that XE accounts for is likely to be small.
Early estimates show that XE has a slightly higher growth rate than its predecessor.
The World Health Organization has put the growth rate of BA.2 at 10%, but UKHSA data shows that XE has a growth rate of 9.8%.
Even as it spreads more easily, experts expect it to diminish in severity. It has not been declared a variant of concern.
The professor of epidemiology at the University of Delaware told CNBC thatXE seems to be moving in the same direction as BA.2, having an increased transmissibility to BA.1 but being less severe.
It is the devil that we know. The reshuffling of the same deck of cards is called a reshuffling.
It should behave as omicron has done before, because it contains spike and structural proteins from the same virus family. Some level of protection against infections should be provided by existing vaccines and immunity.
Tom Peacock, a researcher at Imperial College London, said that recombinants that contain the spike and structural proteins from a single virus are fairly likely to act similarly to their parental virus. The U.K. detected another recombinant in February.
Other recombinants contain spike and structural proteins from different virus families. That includes the XD subvariant, which was recently discovered in Germany, the Netherlands andDenmark, and which Peacock described as a little more concerning.
All new emergences need to be closely monitored to make sure they don't evolve into something more serious.
The virus is still capable of evolving and developing a new branch of its family tree.
The key conclusion is that the risk of hospitalization and death appears to be lower for each of the variations, and that the vaccine should be effective in reducing risk for severe disease.
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