A group of new COVID variants, FLiRT, within the Omicron JN.1 lineage are spreading quickly in the United States.
As per Times report, new variants that include KP.2 AND KP1.1 have mutations that make them more contagious than the previous Omicron variants.
According to the Infectious Disease Society of America, the nickname ‘FLiRT’ derives from the technical names of their mutations.
The data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlighted that the one variant of the FLiRT family KP.2 has prominence Ans is accounts for about 25% of new sequenced cases during the two weeks ending on April 27.
Meanwhile, the other variants, which include KP1.1, have not become as widespread as KP.2 in the US yet.
Dr Eric Topol, executive vice president at Scripps Research and who has written about the FLiRT variants, said that KP.2 would likely cause an uptick in cases, but “My hunch is it won’t be a big wave. It might be a ‘wavelet.’”
Moreover, according to the CDC, for now, the amount of SARS-CoV-2 virus in the US remains ‘minimal,’ and hospitalizations and deaths have also continued to decline steadily since their peak in January.
Even at the global level, the case count rose in early to mid-April but remains far lower than they were a few months ago.
