(Mass Live) Four years since the COVID-19 pandemic led to lockdowns, closures and shortages of supplies, the virus has now mutated to the point where a family of variants are now dominant in the United States.
The dominant variant, KP.2, is part of this family of variants called “FLiRT.” In recent weeks, it took over the dominant variant from the winter and makes up almost 25% of cases in the United States, JN.1, according to partial data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of April 27.
“FLiRT” derives from the technical names of their mutations, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America.
KP.1.1, another FLiRT variant circulating, is less widespread than its sibling and makes up about 7.5% of infections across the country, according to the CDC.
These new variants come with two additional mutations that set them apart from JN.1, which gives them the advantage to spread over other variants, Dr. Albert Ko, professor of public health, epidemiology and medicine at Yale School of Public Health, told
TODAY.
The FLiRT family is part of a familiar strain of COVID-19, along with several dominant strains of the virus from over the past year, like JN.1, HV.1, Eris, and Arcturus — all come from the omicron lineage, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America.
But the FLiRT variants’ story is the “same old story,” John Hopkins University virologist Andrew Pekosz told TODAY. With each new mutation comes a new dominant strain of the virus, which he said happens “three to six months… faster than we see with other viruses like influenza.”
As this strain becomes dominant, it also comes as viral activity based on wastewater levels are considered “minimal,” and they have trended downward in 2024, according to the CDC’s ranking scale.
While its dominance is a hint that FLiRT is more transmissible, or passed on from person to person, Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told TODAY that it’s “still early days.”
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