The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) published, on Monday 9 January, an update of its assessment of the SARS-CoV-2 variant of interest XBB 1.5, a sublineage of XBB with a mutation in the spike protein: S486P. The previous ECDC assessment was on 6 January (see EUROPE 13094/2).
As of 9 January, 4,770 sequences belonging to XBB.1.5 with a mutation in the spike region have been deposited on the GISAID EpiCoV platform. Most of these notifications came from the USA (4,111 sequences) and the UK (202 sequences). The variant has been detected in several other countries, including in the European Union/European Economic Area: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.
According to ECDC, the proportion of XBB.1.5 in the EU/EEA is less than 2.5% for the last two weeks of 2022 for all countries where such low proportions of the variant can be meaningfully estimated.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a doubling time for XBB.1.5 of 9 days.
However, the ECDC points out that these figures are associated with considerable uncertainty.
For the ECDC, it is currently difficult to predict whether the variant will become dominant in the US and it is even more difficult to draw such conclusions for the EU/EEA.
For more information: https://aeur.eu/f/4ts (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)