(Tiper Stock Exchange) – The Biden administration extends the health emergency for Covid until April. “The health emergency for Covid remains in place”, says the ministry of health, pledging to offer states 60 days notice of its possible expiry.
The United States has renewed the emergency every 90 days since the Trump administration first declared it in January 2020. The extension also comes in the wake of the growing popularity of the XBB.1.5 variant.
Meanwhile, according to experts, the subvariant XBB.1.5, known as Kraken, has “an impressive ability to spread”: to write it in the Washington Post is Eric Topol, founder of the Californian institute Scripps and among the researchers who have been following the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic from the beginning.
The appearance of a “dominant form” such as XBB.1.5, observes the expert, indicates that the SarsCoV2 virus “has found a new way to strike and is evolving very rapidly”, so much so that “it is responsible for 75% of infections in at least four states (New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts)” and that “hospitalizations of the elderly are comparable to those seen in the period in the first wave of Omicron”.
In essence, he continues, “The virus is talking to us and telling us that it has many ways to evolve.”