JN.1 Is the Next Big COVID Variant
Expect a big COVID wave this winter
I am traveling with my family in our 20-year-old diesel-powered 40 ft motorhome. It takes quite a bit of maintenance but runs well. Here it is in the mobile home park:
The weather at our destination was good, so we took some chances to suntan, swim in the ocean, and relax a bit.
A New Covid Wave is Here
A year ago, I mentioned XBB 1.5 as the “next big COVID thing.” The prediction in that post turned out to be correct, as the post gathered over 1,300 comments. XBB 1.5 and its descendants have dominated the COVID space ever since.
The newer “variants” circulating until recently were all descendants of XBB 1.5. They constituted a low-level dumpster fire of Covid that we became used to in 2023, with minor genetic changes in the circulating virus named new “variants” of little significance.
All this changed last summer when a strange lone offshoot of a 1.5-year-old variant BA.2, Ba.2.86, suddenly appeared everywhere. My friend Rintrah Radagast predicted it would cause the next big COVID wave, and he was right. His prediction was made early, in August of 2023.
BA.2.86 is, in many ways, something similar to the original Omicron: a variant of considerable distance from its immediate known predecessor, BA.2, without any evidence of intermediate descendants.
(the sudden appearance of such distant variants without any evidence of intermediate natural evolution makes one wonder whether the evolution was not natural and whether laboratory work was involved)
After acquiring several important mutations, this Ba.2.86 mutated to what is known as JN.1, a variant with greater abilities to reinfect people. It feels like two years ago, in late 2021, when the then-new Omicron variant suddenly appeared and took over the world.
Numerous posts on Twitter and Reddit unusually show reinfections (not paxlovid rebounds) happening soon after previous infections.
Many highly-vaccinated locales show spikes in hospitalizations, wastewater covid levels, and Covid prevalence (how many people are sick currently)
Usually, effects of such novel variants are felt just as they exceed about half of all cases, and in the US, we are breaking through that:
Calls for mask-wearing and related virtue-signaling abounds:
I expect about half of the people will catch this new variant - even if some had COVID just recently. Some will refuse to test and would report that they had a sniffle, a cold, a bad flu, or worse.
This manmade pandemic is not going away and is sickening many people who are susceptible to repeat reinfections. The vaccines, sadly, were a tragic mistake and, instead of preventing COVID, made it more likely.
Do you know anyone who had Covid recently? How was it?
Stay well!
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