Should We Fear The XE Variant?

It has not claimed a victim yet, but the new XE variant of Omicron needs careful monitoring. Vaccination and containment are still our best shields against Covid

- Sonali Acharjee

Ever since they started conferring names on the SARS-Cov-2 mutants, we’ve been wading through a Greek alphabet soup. Gallows humour had it that, as we endured Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron and their sub-variants, the WHO tactfully avoided the letter Xi—so as not to offend the Chinese. But the unpredictable rhythms of the Covid assembly line have brought us close enough this time: the new variant in our midst is called XE. It’s from the Omicron family and is suspected to be more infectious than anything else Covid-19 has thrown at us. Health experts and epidemiologists are warily putting it under the scanner—to predict, if that’s at all possible, whether humanity will be tossed aloft on one more of those waves that have risen and abated unevenly across the globe since 2020.

The mood is one of muted alarm, with good reason. Despite a decline in Covid cases in India and other countries, the pandemic hasn’t lost its bite, as data and reports from Europe and China indicate. In Europe, a fresh wave attributed to an Omicron subvariant has led to 1.5 million new cases being recorded daily. In China, the surge was so severe that the country chose to place 26 million residents of its financial hub, Shanghai, on an indefinite lockdown. More than half of the cases there are occurring amongst the elderly and the unvaccinated.