The World Health Organisation (WHO) has labelled the strain as “the most transmissible subvariant that has been detected yet,” with XBB. 1.5 causing large numbers of infections in the US. It’s also been detected in Australia, the UK and several European countries including Denmark, France, Germany, and Spain.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 40 per cent of the country’s infections have been caused by XBB.1.5.
Last week, NSW Health also confirmed the new strain had been detected in “small numbers” across the state.
Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist with the University of Otago, said the reason Kraken created a lot of interest was that it seems “to have a gross advantage over the other subvariants”.
“It does mean that it’s better at infecting people and quite likely to cause a new wave of infections,” Baker told Newstalk ZB.
“It’s got a familiar advantage in that it escapes from the immunity we have from prior infections and vaccinations.”
He said it is also inherently more infectious, and would likely extend the wave of Omicron infections here.
Baker says it is just “a numbers game”, if infections can be kept low then the likelihood of it spreading will be less.
“People often say ‘we have to wait and see if it’s more severe or less than other subvariants ... but actually subvariants that affect a lot more people is much worse in some ways because it just means a lot more people will get sick, in some cases dying,” he said.
He said dying is still the case for about 1 in 1000 people, and possibly about 10 per cent could suffer from long Covid.
University of Auckland associate professor Dr Siouxsie Wiles told RNZ the new strain was spreading rapidly across the globe.
”The reason people are concerned about it is because it has a number of mutations better able to infect and evade immunity from vaccines.”
Wiles said New Zealand had tools to reduce the impact of the new strain.
”It’s becoming the dominant variant in the next few weeks and as we have seen, often by the time it is identified in a country, it moves.”
She told RNZ masks and proper ventilation remained the best weapons to fight the virus, as eradicating it from the air was the best way to control it.
“We have tools that will prevent transmission and sickness from Covid-19 and they work against all variants.”
Her advice was simple.
“I would be advising people to wear masks on public transport and planes, malls, supermarkets, wherever you are around people.”
As with previous strains, Wiles said people’s experiences were very different, with some getting very ill and others largely unaffected.
The new strain is a new version of the Omicron variant and first emerged in New York.
It has quickly exploded across the state and into the New England region, as well as in the UK.
Harvard-trained US epidemiologist Dr Eric Feigl-Ding last week shared a series of alarming posts on Twitter regarding the so-called “super variant”, warning it was “among most immunity-evasive ‘escape variants’ to date” and that it was “one of the best variants for invading human cell” and also “spreads much faster” than older strains.
He described it as the “next big one”, and slammed the CDC for “royally screwing up” by failing to warn people of the danger for weeks on end.
”Hospitalisations [are] already approaching last winter’s crazy Omicron levels. These numbers do not include Veterans Affairs hospitals – and it’s missing several states. So it could be worse,” he said.
Earlier today, the Ministry of Health said a total of 21,685 new Covid cases have been reported in the past week.
More than a third of the cases (8609) were reinfections. There were 53 deaths reported - six were from Northland, 13 were from Auckland region, five were from Waikato, one was from Bay of Plenty, one was from Lakes, one was from Hawke’s Bay, four were from Taranaki, one was from MidCentral, one was from Whanganui, five were from Wellington region, one was from Nelson Marlborough, 11 were from Canterbury, one was from South Canterbury, two were from Southern.
Five of the deaths were people aged in their 50s, five were in their 60s, 10 were in their 70s, 21 were in their 80s and 12 were aged over 90.
Of these people, 28 were women and 25 were men.
Meanwhile, there were 422 Covid patients in hospital as at midnight, including nine people in intensive care.
- with RNZ
