More than 17% of all reported cases were EG.5 in mid-July, up from 7.6% a month before, according to the WHO.
EG.5, which has been unofficially nicknamed “Eris” online, is considered to be a descendant of the XBB lineage of the virus.
It seems to be more transmissible than other circulating variants, likely due to a mutation in its spike protein, and the WHO said it has shown an ability to evade immunity. Eris has been discovered in at least 7,000 cases across 51 countries.
But there is no sign that EG.5 causes more severe Covid symptoms and it poses a “low” risk to global public health, the WHO said, comparing its threat to other recent Omicron subvariants.
Dr Jean-Claude Schmit, director of Luxembourg’s health directorate, agrees that there is no cause for concern currently. “Symptoms are generally on the benign side. Patients report stuffy noses, sore throats, headaches, maybe a mild fever. But that is as far as it goes. We haven’t seen any severe illness with the variants currently circulating among the population.”
He added it was normal for the virus to continue mutating in this manner, calling it “unsurprising”.
How protected is the population against new variants?
Experts believe that people will continue to be protected against new Covid variants. “The continual exposure to new variants helps to create new immunity,” explains Dr Schmit.
Pharmaceutical firms Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax are all working on updating their Covid vaccines to target XBB subvariants.
What is the current Covid situation?
The number of new Covid-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, the World Health Organization said on Friday.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80 percent increase compared to the previous 28 days.
However the number of deaths fell by 57 percent to 2,500.
The WHO warned that the reported number of cases and deaths do not reflect the true numbers, in part because countries carry out far less testing and monitoring than during earlier stages of the pandemic.
Several countries in the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States, United Kingdom, France and Japan have seen a summer uptick in cases in recent weeks.
Experts have suggested that summer gatherings and travel, declining immunity and a new subvariant may have all played a role in the increase. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “the risk remains of a more dangerous variant emerging that could cause a sudden increase in cases and deaths”.
Statistics in Luxembourg have reduced as well, says Dr Schmit: “The laboratories are still obliged to report positive cases, but there are just a handful per day at the moment. There are also patients hospitalised with the virus, but in most cases they were admitted for other reasons and only discovered a Covid infection upon arrival in hospital. The same applies to deaths. At the moment, we don’t have any patients being treated purely for Covid reasons.”
Since July, just a quarter of all countries worldwide have submitted data on Covids deaths to the WHO, while just 11% of countries supplied data on people with severe illness as a result of the virus. Luxembourg no longer provides these figures.
Dr. Schmit explains that the health directorate draws its figures on the infection situation in Luxembourg from wastewater data. Here, in the last few weeks, no new peak was detected as a result of the EG.5 variant.
