The XEC COVID variant is in the U.S. A UT infectious disease specialist says there's likely no need to panic, as the strain is similar to existing ones.

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to evolve, a new variant known as the Covid XEC variant is starting to spread rapidly across Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. First identified in Germany in June,

XEC, a sublineage of the omicron variant, was first reported in Berlin, Germany, in June and is now spreading “quite rapidly” across Europe, North America and Asia, according to Covid data analyst Mike Honey. Slovenia had high rates of infection with this variant in August as over 10 per cent of Covid case samples from the country contained XEC.