...Just six overall cases were reported worldwide as of Friday, but the fact that the variant, nicknamed "Pirola," has already spread across multiple continents is "concerning," said Dr. T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary and genome biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada....
Scientists emphasized that this new variant isn't yet a cause for alarm. Still, COVID infections are increasing internationally, and cases in the U.S. have returned to what is considered "high," with 610,000 new infections per day. That's more than triple the level recorded a month ago, which was around 185,000 cases per day, according to wastewater data used to estimate the spread of disease. However, this uptick in cases is not due to the new variant yet. Other closely-related variants like EG.5 and XBB.1.16 make up an estimated one-third of cases, with the rest caused by a couple dozen other variants, according to CDC data released Friday.
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