There’s a new COVID-19 variant dominating infections in the U.S. EG.5 — or “Eris,” as it’s been nicknamed — was identified in China in February and detected in the U.S. in April, and now accounts for more than 17% of COVID-19 cases nationwide, which is the most of any variant.
Here’s what you need to know about the new variant.
How do symptoms compare to other COVID-19 variants?
“We haven’t seen a radical departure that [EG.5] is going to cause new symptoms or that it’s going to look a lot different,” Dr. David Alain Wohl, an infectious diseases professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tells Yahoo Life. “We don’t see anything that indicates that the virus is evolving to be more dangerous.”
EG.5 is a subvariant within the Omicron family of coronaviruses, so it’s pretty closely related to the XBB variant that’s been circulating for a while and was dominant months earlier. You can’t tell which variant you have just based on symptoms (that requires genomic sequencing, which isn’t a routine part of clinical care). But you can expect symptoms from EG.5 to look a lot like what we’ve come to know from other COVID-19 variants, including:
- Fever
- Cough
- Stuffy or runny nose
- Sore throat
- New loss of taste or smell
The headline indicates that you would address if the current vaccines work against this variant but that is not addressed in the article.
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