It's appearing in European sites already, and showing a pretty big growth advntage. Previous reports I've seen suggest the next covid wave in the US will peak around February, but the way this new variant is growing it might peak in late december or january.
JN.1 is a variant of BA.2.86 (aka Pirola), which was detected several months ago. It takes BA.2.86, which already demonstrated traits to evade immunity, and adds a couple key mutations: "L455S and P681R - ⬆️⬆️Immune evasive AND ⬆️⬆️fusogenic." - @RaffyFlynnArt (med science, phd researcher) - nitter - twitter
They think it might be an omicron-like event. What happens in sites in Europe where it's showing up will probably be an accurate preview of how it effects everywhere else.
Here's a chart of the growth advantage: nitter - twitter
Here's a prediction from JWeiland, whose predictions have been pretty accurate in the past nitter - twitter They do not think it will be an omicron-like event, but will be significant.
Dr. Eric Topal - twitter, who still takes covid seriously but isn't a covid doomer, warns that it's showing the most growth advantage we've seen in a long time.
The new vaccine shots are supposed to protect against BA.2.86, but we don't know how well it will work against the newest variant JN.1, and we don't know how protective a recent infection with a different variant will be. Probably better to be exposed while your blood is flooded with covid antibodies, with as little virus as possible, rather than not.
Edit, the new vaccine works against JN.1
We now report that administration of an updated monovalent mRNA vaccine (XBB.1.5 MV) to uninfected individuals boosted serum virus-neutralization antibodies significantly against not only XBB.1.5 (27.0-fold) and the currently dominant EG.5.1 (27.6-fold) but also key emergent viruses like HV.1, HK.3, JD.1.1, and JN.1 (13.3-to-27.4-fold). In individuals previously infected by an Omicron subvariant, serum neutralizing titers were boosted to highest levels (1,764-to-22,978) against all viral variants tested.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.26.568730v1
And, since the "free market" dictated that the new covid vaccines should be an expensive hassle to get, with side effects often making people feel sick for a day or two, not many people have gotten them. 👍
Taking measures to reduce the amount of virus you are exposed to will certainly help if you end up getting infected. On top of the vaccine, using a HQ Mask in crowds, use anti-viral nasal sprays (including while you get sick, if you do get sick), and air filtration in places you have control over should all help.
All these measures will protect from other less severe illnesses as well, because covid didn't replace any of them, it's just adding to the burden and making them all worse. Abnormally high rates of all manner of severe respiratory infections in various places around the world for two or three years running is probably evidence of this.
As of now, asking people to try to avoid covid is like asking people to avoid cigarette smoke if people started smoking indoors in every public and private building, but that's where we are.
And no, avoiding a cold won't make your immune system weak.. When it comes to covid and other viruses the only way to "excercise" your immune system safely is to get vaccinated.
A covid infection, on the other hand, might actually disregulate your immune response - (twitter).
Here's a twitter thread explaining what it would look like if covid is causing immune disregulation. - (twitter)
Once again I am putting it on the record that I, a nobody with an internet connection and a small amount of free time, thinks that essentially turning the world into a gain-of-function experiment for a highly contagious endothelial disease that harms the immune system was a really bad idea.
On the other hand, the honorable and wise psychopaths who run our governments took a look at all the data and asked hard quesions like: "wtf does all this mean? so it kills old people, who cares? why are we shutting things down for that?" They have well-paid experts advising them and they seem to think it's fine, so who knows? 
I saw a patient who was 20 with long covid. She can't even tolerate listening to music and can't work. I saw another who developed paralysis in his hand (thankfully treatment has helped and he's recovering)
Fuck the west
Last years covid was pretty bad, worse than 2021 or 2020 even I think. You wouldn't know by media but there's still plenty people dieing or getting long term consequences
There was a huge spike at the end of 2021 when omicron arrived. 2022 had a pretty high rates most of the year but we didn't see another huge spike, so hospitals weren't as crushed by it. 2023 was relatively low after the beginning of the year, and then we stopped tracking hospital covid cases as closely, and dropped mask requirements in medical facilities, and are basically pretending it's a solved problem.
If you look at https://biobot.io/data/ and view "total results" you can see clinical data disappear halfway into 2023, while wastewater shows a recent wave.
Jn.1 has from less than 1% of all sequences sampled in the US to about 8% in a few weeks, which is pretty alarming growth. It's so new the cdc isn't tracking it separately from the variant it mutated from.
Meanwhile parts of Canada are showing more covid in wastewater than last winter, and it's looking more like the appearance of omicron.
Show
- What is most concerning, however, is what I believe to be mass immune dysregulation caused by repeated infections with SARS-CoV-2 (@fitterhappierAJ ).
We see this in:
Increased RSV
Specific interaction with dengue
Increased TB
Increased outbreaks of atypical infections.
- In short, allowing SARS-CoV-2 to transmit globally with no attempt to mitigate may well have, in aggregate, dysregulated the immune system of the global human population, and, with bitter irony, made another pandemic more likely
This shit has been keeping me up at night for YEARS now
I'm not a doctor, so grain of salt and all that, but I think it's gonna take some time to go catastrophic... But it's also not going to be alone for long either. It doesn't look like Monkeypox has gotten stronger, but that we've gotten collectively weaker. Every wave of covid that passes through the population weakens our collective immune system by lessening our herd immunity to every other virus out there. Millions of people who are now vulnerable to viruses, that they wouldn't have been before Covid, will lead to an increase in R values of those viruses without them needing to be stronger. From there, much like covid, the viruses will spread at much greater levels leading to an increase in opportunities to mutate. And that's when shit's gonna get catastrophic.
Yeah, I keep reading about abnormally severe outbreaks of different diseases, and a lot of them are known to be severe in people with compromised immune systems.
It's assumed to be the resumption of a normal pattern after covid mitigations, but it's happening in places that experienced minimal mitigations until vaccines were available, and then dropped them completely.
And since not many people are not keeping up with new vaccines, or doing anything to protect themselves, how protective can "booster infections" be with a disease that's increasingly immune evasive and mutating as quickly as covid?
Ya, for a "fun" game do a Google search of a random disease name and covid and you'll typically find an article talking about sudden outbreaks after covid waves. The herpes family of virii seems to love it.
It's so typical of the powerful. They don't want to expend an iota of thought about stuff they aren't interested in. All they want to do is manage the optics. It reminds me of Trump who I think symbolizes politicians all over the world. With the change that he's mask off and blatant about it. At the beginning of his administration he said "I like bullets." In other words - he wanted reports short as possible with bullet points and not much else.
I scrolled to the bottom of the article and at the very end I found this.
– In July 2020, Sir Patrick wrote that then-chancellor Rishi Sunak said “it is all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus” during an economics meeting, but had not realised Sir Chris Whitty was in the room.
– Mr Johnson was in favour of letting the virus “rip” in October 2020, acknowledging people would die, while former senior adviser Dominic Cummings said “Rishi (Sunak) thinks just let people die and that’s OK.”
