A new coronavirus subvariant is gaining steam and drawing more attention as a potential threat heading into late autumn and winter — a development that threatens to reverse recent promising transmission trends and is prompting doctors to renew their calls for residents to get an updated vaccine. XEC, which was first detected in Germany, is gaining traction in Western Europe, said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California.
Like virtually all coronavirus strains that have emerged in the past few years, it’s a member of the sprawling Omicron family — and a hybrid between two previously documented subvariants, KP.3 and KS.1.
1. Past surges have tended “to move from Western Europe to the East Coast to the West Coast of the U.S.
,” Hudson said. “So if this does take off more and more as we get towards the colder weather months, this probably would be the variant that will potentially take hold.” XEC hasn’t been widely seen nationally so far.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, KP.
3.1.1, a descendant of the FLiRT subvariants , is the dominant circulating strain nationwide.
For the two-week period ending Sept. 14, KP.3.
1.1 was estimated to comprise 52.7% of the nation’s coronavirus specimens.
XEC, by comparison, isn’t yet being tracked on the CDC’s variant website. A subvariant needs to make up an estimated 1% or more of coronavirus cases nationwide to qualify. But there are e.