Descendants of Omicron are proliferating worldwide — and the same mutations are coming up again and again.
Credit: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty
In Europe, North America and Africa, the prevalence of Omicron offshoots in the BQ.1 family is rising quickly, even as overall cases seem to fall. In Asian countries including Singapore, Bangladesh and India, a lineage called XBB has already set off fresh waves of infection. Scientists are closely watching several regions where both are circulating, to see which has the edge.
Of the swarm, BQ.1.1 and XBB seem to be rising to the top. The BQ.1 family is already dominant in France and is likely to drive infection waves across Europe and North America as these regions enter winter. It is also a common ingredient of the variant soup in South Africa, Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. XBB, by contrast, looks likely to dominate infections in Asia, where it recently drove a wave of infections in Singapore.Researchers are also monitoring countries where BQ.1.