5 Things to Know About the XEC Variant

COVID-19’s summer surge is starting to cool off, the latest national data shows, but public health experts urge people not to let their guard down.

Cases and hospitalizations remain elevated, particularly among older adults and younger children, a Sept. 13 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows. Plus, COVID activity historically spikes in the fall and winter months when more people are indoors.

There’s also a new coronavirus variant that public health officials and virologists are keeping a close eye on. The strain, known as XEC, has been detected in several countries, including the U.S., where a handful of cases have been reported.  

“[XEC] is starting to really show evidence of being the most rapidly increasing variant that’s causing COVID right now,” says Andrew Pekosz, a professor in the department of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It “appears to be the most likely one to get legs next,” Eric Topol, M.D., founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote on the social media platform X.

Here’s what you need to know about XEC, including how to amp up your protection against the COVID variant.  

1.  XEC is a hybrid variant

Researchers refer to the XEC variant, which is in the omicron family, as a recombinant virus — a hybrid of two other variants.

“I think that’s another reason why people are interested in following [XEC] right now, because [recombinant] variants oftentimes have very unpredictable results, because they’re basically resulting from two different variants sort of coming together and exchanging their genes,” Pekosz says.

XEC is a mix of KP.3.3 — an offshoot of KP.3, one of the FLiRT variants that drove the summer surge — and KS.1.1.