'Scrabble variants' now cause the majority of new Covid-19 infections in the US | CNN

The Omicron BA.5 subvariant is no longer the dominant cause of Covid-19 infections in the United States, according to estimates released Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Instead, a host of new sublineages – offshoots of BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 – are now responsible for the majority of new infections in this country. Dr. Peter Hotez, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, calls these many new lineages “Scrabble variants” because they contain letters like X and Q that get high scores in the game.

The new variants descend from slightly different branches of the Omicron family tree, but they have evolved to share some of the same changes in their genomes that help them slip past our immunity against the virus.