New COVID Variant May Be Less Severe Than Feared: Report

A budding variant of COVID-19 that has made headlines as it is expected to surge this winter could be more mild than some feared.

Two teams from China and Sweden found evidence that the “highly mutated” COVID-19 variant Pirola, or BA.2.86, may not cause as severe illness or be as contagious as some experts believed. The strain, which first emerged late this summer, has an usual number of mutations that caused alarm among leading virologists.

Data posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, on Aug. 31 by Yunlong Cao from the Biomedical Innovation Center in Peking, China, found that Pirola was less infectious than other variants like XBB1.1.5 and EG.5, also known as Eris, that have circulated over summer.

However, using blood from vaccinated people and mice, as well as recently infected people, the Chinese research team found that antibodies from these three groups that target XBB weren’t very effective at neutralizing Pirola.

“I would say it will slowly circulate in the population. It will not be able to compete with other fast prevailing variants,” Dr. Cao said in an email to CNN. Eris and the newer Fornax are currently the dominant variants in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ben Murrell from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden posted preliminary findings to X on September 1st, indicating that resistance in the population against XBB is also helpful against Pirola.

“Overall, it doesn't appear to be nearly as extreme a situation as the original emergence of Omicron,” Dr. Murrell said on X. 

“It isn’t yet clear whether BA.2.86 (or its offspring) will outcompete the currently-circulating variants, and I don’t think there is yet any data about its severity, but our antibodies do not appear to be completely powerless against it,” he said. 

The results from both teams are still pending peer-review before being published in a scientific journal.