Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said earlier this week that there had been no significant uptick in deaths or even severity of symptoms due to the new sub-variant, nicknamed Eris, compared to other Covid-19 strains.
The number of Covid-19 cases requiring hospitalization or warding in intensive care units (ICUs) is staying stable, MOH told Yahoo Southeast Asia on Aug 11 (Fri).
However, the number of cases due to Eris is expected to grow, Prof Hsu Li Yang, the Vice Dean of Global Health of the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, told CNA, because the new variant has an immune escape.
Eris is “better able to evade the immune systems of those who had Covid in the past, or were vaccinated against Covid in the past,” he explained.
The EG.5 coronavirus strain is a spin-off of the Omicron strain discovered late in 2021. Eris has been found in South Korea, Japan, Canada, and other countries and is also spreading quickly in Ireland and France.
Furthermore, an offshoot of EG.5 with another mutation, termed EG.5.1, is spreading quickly in the US and England, where it is now responsible for 15 per cent of new Covid-19 cases.
On Wednesday, Aug 9, Eris was elevated by the World Health Organisation from being a “variant under monitoring” to a “variant of interest”, which indicates that the WHO believes it needs to be tracked and studied further.
But the WHO has said there is no cause to ring alarm bells, at least for now.
“Based on the available evidence, the public health risk posed by EG.5 is evaluated as low at the global level,” said the WHO.
While Eris has greater transmissibility than previous variants, the symptoms it causes do not appear to be more severe than other Omicron variants.
“We don’t detect a change in severity of EG.5 compared to other sublineages of Omicron that have been in circulation since late 2021,” said Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19. /TISG
#CovidIsNotOver: New variant ‘Eris’ behind rising cases in US, China & UK