Latest COVID-19 variant to hit Alberta is no cause for alarm, experts say, but they’re tracking it | CBC News

As the SARS CoV-2 virus continues to evolve, yet another new subvariant has appeared in Alberta.

XBB.1.16 is growing in prevalence in a number of countries, including India, where most cases have been detected so far.

According to Alberta Health, the first case was detected in the province on March 31. By April 9, 11 cases had been confirmed.

Testing, though, is not as robust as it was earlier in the pandemic. The province closed PCR swabbing facilities at the end of March and now conducts full genome sequencing to track variants on a subset of cases.

A spokesperson for the department said XBB.1.16 continues to circulate in low numbers and accounts for five to seven per cent of those sequenced cases.

The World Health Organization (WHO) designated XBB.1.16 a “variant of interest” last week, noting its growth advantage and ability to escape immunity.

But the WHO said it does not appear to be causing more severe disease and does not appear to pose an additional health risk.

“I don’t think it’s a reason to panic or be highly worried,” said Dr. Lorne Tyrrell, director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology at the University of Alberta.

“It may come in and be a little more easy to spread and then it might become the more dominant variant, but I don’t think we’re going to see a lot more disease with it.”

Between vaccination and infection rates, Tyrrell doesn’t expect a big surge in cases or hospitalizations if this Omicron offshoot takes hold in the province.

“We will watch to make sure that we don’t see that it becomes very dominant and that there is more infection in hospital. We’ll watch to make sure it’s not more severe,” he said.

“I have been reading that it does cause a little more conjunctivitis [pink eye] with this particular variant … so that might be something that we’ll see.” 

XBB.1.16 is similar to XBB.1.5, the subvariant that’s currently dominant in Alberta. As of Tuesday, XBB.1.5 accounted for 61 per cent of cases.

But the latest sublineage has mutations that experts are monitoring closely.

“This is a particular variant that seems to be spreading notably, so we want to watch it,” said Fiona Brinkman, a professor of genomics and bioinformatics at Simon Fraser University.

“But there’s no evidence of it causing more severe disease and there’s not evidence that it’s causing significant outbreaks in all provinces, which would be a sign of something more concerning.”

According to the SFU professor, a spike protein mutation improves the ability of the virus to spread and infect people.

And there are concerns that it may lead to reinfections in Canadians who’ve recently had a bout of COVID, said Brinkman, who is also a member of CoVaRR-Net, a group of Canadian researchers tracking coronavirus variants.

“This is still changing over time, and we are seeing some additional mutations on top of this XBB.1.16 variant — that we are also tracking — that may give it the ability to both better infect and better evade our immune response,” she said.

According to Brinkman, researchers are tracking a number of variants at this time, and while she doesn’t see any signs they’ll spark another big wave soon, there is no indication COVID-19 cases will drop, either.

“It would not be surprising to see a pretty steady level of people getting COVID over the next few months.”

Brinkman said there are a number of steps people can take to avoid infection or reinfection, including getting a vaccine booster dose.

High-risk Albertans, including seniors and immunocompromised adults, became eligible for an additional bivalent booster earlier this month.