Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, suddenly breaks out like a horse from the gate, leaving the rest of the race behind. This time, it’s a variant called XEC (“Zek”), which is a recombinant — the result of two variants joining forces.

“We controlled [the virus] a little bit initially, but then let it rip, and once you have an uncontrolled spread, it does mutate. And also it recombines, like when somebody has [been] infected with two different things, like in this case KS.1.1 and KP.3.3 recombined to form this XEC variant”, explained Dr. Raj Rajnarayanan, associate professor and assistant dean at the New York Institute of Technology, in an interview with Salon.

Rajnarayanan, a computational biologist, has studied the repurposing of old drugs for the treatment of viruses since the original SARS outbreak of 2002-2004, and he’s closely following the rise of XEC, which was recently added to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s variant tracker. By the end of last month, XEC commanded an estimated 4.7% share of the total number of variants globally (and 6% in the US, with a wide margin of uncertainty), but unlike KP.3.1.1, which still holds a 36.9% share (58.7 in the US), XEC is on the way up, and fast.

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“It might start becoming the top circulating lineage,” Rajnaranayam said, predicting XEC will take the rest of October and early November to gradually outcompete KP.3.1.1 in the United States, becoming the dominant lineage over the winter 2024/25 season.

Rajnarayanan doesn’t believe we need to worry about XEC in the sense that it represents a substantially new form of SARS-CoV-2, as when the first Omicron appeared on the scene with new symptoms and vast number of new cases, spawning an entirely new branch on the virus’ evolutionary tree. Jerome Adams, who was Surgeon General during the Trump Administration and those terrible early days of the pandemic, sees vaccination as part of a routine that, if kept up, can protect many of us from the hospitalizations and deaths that COVID is still causing regardless of the variant. And it can protect from the increasingly-appreciated dangers of long COVID, in which the symptoms of the disease linger for months or even years.

XEC has sparked interest among experts, partly because it represents a bit of a mystery right now.

“We’ve been through this literally dozens of times since 2020,” Adams told Salon in a video interview. “There are going to continue to be different variants out there. Sometimes they’ve going to be more transmissible, sometimes they’ve going to be less, sometimes they’re going to cause more [severe] disease, sometimes they’ve going to be less severe. And we need to make sure we’re leveraging the tools that we have available to be able to live with the virus, masking when it makes sense, particularly in the midst of a surge, testing."

Adams said it’s really important that people understand they can order four free at-home COVID tests, emphasizing to seek treatment if you........

© Salon