LOS ANGELES (KNX) —Just as Delta and Omicron have overtaken much of the world, reports of a new COVID-19 variant with up to 46 mutations are coming out of Great Britain. The B.1.640.2 variant, known as “IHU,” has so far infected just 12 people since it was first reported in November, according to Bloomberg News.
Discovered in southern France around the same time that the Omicron variant was discovered in South Africa, IHU has been mostly out of the news until recently. Tuesday, the World Health Organization’s Abdi Mahamud said it’s been on the WHO’s radar, but that it’s not quite at the top of their list since it’s been slow-moving compared to Omicron.
The first case of IHU was linked to a person who had recently traveled to Cameroon, Western Africa, according to The Independent, but little is known about what threat it poses to the rest of the world just yet.
How worried should we be? Doctor Brian Labus, an epidemiologist and professor in the University of Las Vegas, Nevada's School of Public Health, joined In Depth to answer that question.
“We continue to see variants pop up all over the world. It still remains to be seen if this variant means anything or is just one of the many that we’ve seen that goes nowhere,” Labus said. “So at this point we’re watching to see if it means anything but it’s a little too early to be super concerned about it.”
While the news of a new variant is alarming to many, Labus said variants are to be expected as long as people remain unvaccinated.
“In many ways, if we had vaccinated everybody on the first day it was available and stopped a lot of the transmission — we would stop the number of variants that were popping out,” he said.
“But as long as there’s any transmission, variants are always going to arise because that’s just the nature of viruses.”
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