Explainer: Do I need to worry about COVID again?

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[1/3]A nurse fills up syringes with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines for residents who are over 50 years old and immunocompromised and are eligible to receive their second booster shots in Waterford, Michigan, U.S., April 8, 2022..

suggests that a newer, highly mutated variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 is not as alarming as some experts had feared when it was first detected several weeks ago...

Nicknamed "Pirola" on social media, the BA.2.86 Omicron subvariant is being tracked by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)...

According to CDC data, the EG.5 subvariant, a descendant of the Omicron lineage nicknamed "Eris" on social media that originally emerged in November 2021, accounts for about a fifth of current U.S. COVID cases...

Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, believes FL.1.5.1 will become the predominant COVID variant in the coming months, but he does not expect an infection wave like the one driven by Omicron last winter...

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