New COVID Variant XEC Is Here: What Are the Symptoms?

As the summer COVID surge driven by the so-called FLiRT variants finally appears to be subsiding, American health authorities fear a new variant called XEC — which is swiftly spreading through Europe — may help drive another wave of illness in the United States.

This latest coronavirus variant has shown strong growth in Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, according to the global science initiative GISAID.org.

Another source of information on COVID variants, Outbreak.info, reports that scientists have detected XEC in at least 28 countries, including Australia, China, and South Korea.

Illnesses traced to XEC are still too limited in the United States to appear on tracking charts shared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), making up fewer than 1 percent of cases, but surveillance teams have identified a small number of sicknesses in numerous states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

“XEC is not very prevalent in the United States right now, but that will likely change if it is indeed more evolutionarily fit than current dominant variants,” says Amesh Adalja, MD, senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America.

How Is XEC Different From the Current Top Variants?

Right now, the coronavirus variant KP3.1.1 (a close relative of other top variants — KP.2, KP.2.3, and KP.3) accounts for about half of the COVID-19 infections in the country.

XEC is different, though, because it is a “recombinant” virus, meaning it incorporates features from two other variants (in this case, KS.1.1 and KP.3.3), explains Peter Chin-Hong, MD, a professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, who specializes in infectious diseases.

He points out that XEC has a mutation in a so-called spike protein that may improve its ability to bind to human cells, which in turn may heighten contagiousness.