The most virulent form of COVID seen in the three years since the pandemic started was detected in Australia before Christmas.
New South Wales Health confirmed in a statement Thursday morning that a tiny number of cases of the rogue XBB.1.5 subvariant were picked up in the two weeks prior to December 24.
While there were no signs, the latest strain, nicknamed ‘the kraken’ is any worse than recent versions of COVID, there are fears that are emerging that it might serve as a gateway to a more dangerous subvariant.
The thought is, the more infections that ensue, the more opportunities the virus has to mutate and evolve.
In all 59,652 people in NSW were diagnosed with COVID-19 in the two weeks to 31 December 2022 in NSW, which was a decline in cases.
While the BR.2 sub-variant was the most typically found in new cases, XBB.1.5 was present after taking hold in the United States and emerging in Britain.
The department announced that NSW Health continues to observe occurring sub-variants including XBB.1.5, of which there have been a small number of detections in the two weeks to 24 December 2022.
XBB.1.5 is another spinoff of Omicron and has already taken hold in the US where it’s thought to be behind roughly 70 per cent of new infections in the worst impacted regions.
It has also been picked up in Britain and across Europe, in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland and in Singapore and India.
But XBB.1.5 seems to be just as mild as its ancestor Omicron and its variants.
A University of Sydney infectious diseases expert, Professor Robert Booy, said Australia’s high vaccination rate combined with natural immunity should protect most people.
He told Sky News that their vaccines probably do protect against it and they shouldn’t be unduly concerned although he’s named it ‘extra bad boy’ but that was just a way of remembering the name XBB.1.5.
He said it’s more virulent, more active, young and able to get around but that it was more severe, not more infectious, and it’s not more likely to put you in the hospital, and there’s early concern about the new subvariant based on how it’s presently surging in the US and Europe.
Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s the technical leader for COVID, told a press conference on Wednesday that they were worried about its growth advantage in particular in some countries in Europe and in the US, especially the Northeast part of the United States, where XBB.1.5 has rapidly replaced other circulating variants.
Well, there will be many that won’t be wearing a mask or taking a test, and they’ll be telling them to peace off.
And every variant that we’ve had has been more transmissible than the other – now this variant is the most transmissible. How much more contagious does it have to get before it gets any more transmissible?
In most cases, people die of all manner of ailments, but then when COVID came along they were just registered as a COVID death, whether someone died of that or not, it was simply put on the death certificate to terrorise people so that they would yield with what the Governments told them to do.
And all that this most recent propaganda will do is prompt the uninformed into accepting yet another evil jab, with each booster boosting the possibility of cardiac arrest, strokes, turbo cancer, you name it!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 