In Norse mythology, the Kraken was a gigantic monster that brought terror to the seas, destroying ships and killing sailors.
The mythological creature’s name is being used to dub the new omicron subvariant of the coronavirus, XBB.1.5, which is expanding across the United States and already accounts for about 40% of Covid-19 cases in the country, compared to 20% in the United States. last week.
The first expert to use the moniker Kraken was Canadian evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory. “Some of us [acadêmicos] we decided that we needed nicknames for variants that we needed to watch out for, as the WHO [Organização Mundial da Saúde] was not giving any new names on your system,” wrote Gregory on Twitter.
“We have been using mythological creature names for variants that are being discussed outside of technical discussions,” he added.
According to the latest data from the US government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the subvariant leads the number of national cases of Covid-19 and has gained space mainly in the northeast. In regions like New York, it is already responsible for 75% of confirmed cases.
The CDC warns that this dominant subvariant of Covid-19 “may be more transmissible than other variants”, but it is not yet known whether it causes “more serious” effects.
US hospitals are seeing an increase in hospitalizations over the last month across the country, although the Northeast area, with high numbers for this subvariate, has not seen a disproportionate increase in hospitalizations compared to other regions.
The XBB.1.5 subvariant is related to the XBB omicron variant, which has been found in at least 35 countries with clinical severity in Singapore and India, collecting WHO data.
The organization warned that XBB.1.5 is “the most transmissible subvariant ever detected”, but Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical director for Covid-19, said at a press conference on Wednesday (4) that for now there is no data proving that Kraken causes more severe cases of the disease.
What is known is that XBB.1.5 has greater ability to escape the defenses of the immune system and to “connect” to the cells of the human body, being able to spread more easily.
“We are concerned about their growth advantage [no número de casos], in particular in some European countries and the United States,” said Van Kerkhove. “Our concern is how transmissible it is… and the more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to change.”
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