After about four years of living with COVID, which pushed the world into various periods of lockdown for years, one thing is clear - the virus is here to stay. There's still much to learn about SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID). Still, the virus has continued to evolve from the original Wuhan variant to Delta, to Omicron, and several others in between.
New variants have driven repeated waves of infection and challenged doctors and scientists seeking to understand this changing virus' behaviour. Now, we are faced with a new group of variants, the so-called FLiRT, which appear to be contributing to a rising wave of COVID-19 infections worldwide, including India. So where have they come from, and are they cause for concern? A descendant of Omicron The FLiRT variants are a group of subvariants of JN.
1 from the Omicron lineage. JN.1 was detected in August 2023 and declared a variant of interest by the World Health Organization in December 2023.
By early 2024, it had become the most dominant variant in Australia and much of the rest of the world, driving large waves of infections. As new variants emerge, scientists work hard to try to understand their potential impact. This includes sequencing their genes and assessing their potential to transmit, infect and cause disease.
In late 2023 scientists detected a range of subvariants of JN.1 in wastewater in the United States. Since then, these JN.
1 subvariants, including KP.1.1, KP.
2 and KP.3, have popped up and become more commo.
