Now what? Covid is becoming too friendly

[syed putra]

The mystery of why Covid-19 seems to be becoming milder​

17 hours ago
David Cox

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(Credit: Getty Images)
Covid-19 is now ubiquitous – but hospitalisations seem to be on a downward trajectory. No one knows why.
When virologists took their first peek at XEC, the Covid-19 variant which started to become dominant in the autumn of 2024, the early signs were ominous.
The latest descendant of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, XEC had arisen through recombination, a process where two other variants had forged their genetic material together. Tests seemed to indicate that this would easily allow it to evade the immune protection offered by past infections or the latest iterations of the Covid-19 vaccines, based on the older JN.1 and KP.2 variants.
"The spike protein is quite different from previous variants, so it was quite easy to assume that XEC has the potential to evade immunity induced by JN.1 infection," says Kei Sato, a virology professor at the University of Tokyo, who carried out one of the first studies of XEC, published in December 2024.