New recombinant strains may trigger surge in covid infections during winter

Hyderabad: Just a few weeks ahead of winter, new recombinant strains of coronavirus have emerged that are now threatening to trigger a fresh surge of Covid-19 infections, especially in Europe and United States, which tends to have a cascading impact throughout India including Telangana. While the daily Covid-19 infections in the last few months have […]

Hyderabad: Just a few weeks ahead of winter, new recombinant strains of coronavirus have emerged that are now threatening to trigger a fresh surge of Covid-19 infections, especially in Europe and United States, which tends to have a cascading impact throughout India including Telangana.

While the daily Covid-19 infections in the last few months have been low in Telangana, the SAR-CoV-2 has not stopped its journey of evolution, as new immune evading strains have continued to get reported not only in India but even abroad.

In the last few weeks, XBB, which is a recombinant lineage between two Omicron sub lineages BJ.1 and BA2.75, has quickly emerged as a potential candidate strain of the coronavirus that could perhaps trigger a new surge in Covid infections during the winter season.

The recombinant strains of the SARS-CoV2, which are nothing but hybrid of two-different lineages, could thrive in the winter, due to waning immunity and general lack of precautionary measures against the respiratory virus among people, researchers and scientists fear.

A few days ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had alerted about the potential spike in Covid infections during winter. “We are now seeing a welcome decline in reported deaths globally. However, with colder weather approaching in the northern hemisphere, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in hospitalizations and deaths in the coming months,” WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a recent media briefing, said.

The WHO official pointed out that the new variants of the coronavirus are more transmissible than their predecessors, and the risk of even more transmissible and more dangerous variants remains and added that pretending that a deadly virus is not circulating is a huge risk.

Genetic researchers in India, who have been tracking new variants of SARS-CoV-2 since the initial days of the pandemic, have maintained that XBB could emerge as a prominent variant in India because it could be one of the most antibody evasive variants.

“XBB and its sub lineage XBB.1 has been largely found in Singapore and now in Bangladesh, though also found across Europe, North America and Asia. To note, Singapore is having an ongoing surge of infections. Recent research has suggested XBB could be one of the most antibody evasive variants. The data suggests that the variant can evade a wide spectrum of monoclonal antibodies,” senior scientist at CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Vinod Scaria, on social media platform Twitter, said.