MedPageToday It’s a descendant of XBB.1.5, but it “isn’t setting off any red flags for me,” expert says.
The CDC is tracking a handful of new COVID variants, including the EU.1.1 variant, which now makes up an estimated 1.7% of U.S. COVID cases.
EU.1.1 is an XBB sublineage related to the XBB.1.5 variant that currently accounts for an estimated 27% of COVID cases in the country.
So how worrisome is this variant? Experts who spoke to MedPage Today said it’s not time to raise the EU.1.1 alarm, but some caution is warranted.
Utah leads the U.S. with at least 97 EU.1.1 cases sampled, although Kelly Oakeson, PhD, chief scientist of the Utah Department of Health & Human Services, told MedPage Today that “Utah is doing more sequencing than, I think, everybody else in our region.”
Oakeson pointed out that EU.1.1 does not appear have a big advantage in terms of transmissibility or severity. He said that “we’re not seeing any kind of increases in hospitalizations or anything. It’s some XBB [sublineage] that’s picked up some more mutations in the spike protein, but nothing that’s telling us that it’s more severe, or more anything, than the other XBB sublineages that are circulating.”
Rajendram Rajnarayanan, PhD, of the New York Institute of Technology and Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, told MedPage Today that EU.1.1 is “definitely more transmissible than the parent lineage, XBB.1.5, but it doesn’t have any advantage over other circulating lineages right now.” Rajnarayanan maintains a COVID-19 variant database. He said he saw the variant emerge in early June with an uptick in Utah cases.