The World Health Organization has classified a COVID-19 variant detected last year in France as one under monitoring rather than a strain of interest or concern, the latter of which the highly transmissible omicron variant falls under.
Following widespread headlines about the discovery of B.1.640.2, or the "IHU" variant, nicknamed for Méditerranée Infection University Hospital Institute in Marseilles, France where it was first identified, a WHO official said in the United Nations agency's press briefing on Tuesday that it was "closely monitoring" the variant. The WHO, tellingly, hasn't assigned a letter of the Greek alphabet to the strain.
Officials reserve those titles for variants of interest and concern. A variant of interest is, according to the organization, a strain with genetic differences that can change the virus’ characteristics – like transmissibility and disease severity – and has spread enough "to suggest an emerging risk to global public health."
A variant of concern, meanwhile, has either increased transmissibility, virulence or it makes existing public health measures – like vaccines or therapeutics – less effective. Omicron fell into this category when it was assigned a Greek letter in November.
The IHU variant doesn't yet bear the characteristics of either category.
"The virus had a lot of chances to pick up," Dr. Abdi Mahamud, Incident Manager with the WHO COVID-19 Incident Management Support Team, told reporters on Tuesday.
A yet-to-be-peer-reviewed-or-replicated study published on Dec. 29 by researchers where the variant was identified found 12 cases of the variant in southeastern France. The cases were linked to one man who returned from a trip to Cameroon in mid-November.
Although IHU has a similar number of mutations as the omicron variant, including ones that increase transmissibility and its ability to evade vaccine immunity, Dr. George Rutherford, Head of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at UCSF, said the "strain is more of a curiosity than anything else."
"Omicron came in in November, and completely shoved this out of the way," Rutherford told KCBS Radio’s Rebecca Corral in an interview on Wednesday. "There are only 20 cases that we know about, as opposed to millions of omicron cases. It certainly doesn't appear to be out-competing omicron."
In the United States alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that the omicron variant accounted for 95.4% of cases for the week ending on Jan. 1.
Will another variant – IHU or otherwise – eventually overtake omicron?
"We don't know," Rutherford said. "We don't know. But what I can tell you is that we will continue to see mutations, and we'll continue to identify these variants and we'll continue to follow 'em. And if we need to, we can change the vaccines around to address them if they seem to be spreading more rapidly.
"But for right now, we're focused wholly on omicron," he added "and that's why we need to have boosters, and that's why we need to be wearing masks, and that's why we need to be careful."
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