Americans, as well as people I’ve met in foreign travel, are just plain over the COVID-19 panicdemic, the spelling of that word meant to indicate just how I saw the whole thing. Virtually no one other than Taylor Lorenz, who has told us that she is immunocompromised, wears a face mask these days. I will very, very! occasionally see someone in Kroger wearing a mask, but I don’t know their individual circumstances; any one of them could be sick himself, or seriously immunocompromised, and I do not judge them or take assumptions about their conditions.

Well, here they go again! From The New York Times:

There’s a New Covid Variant. What Will That Mean for Spring and Summer?

Experts are closely watching KP.2, now the leading variant.

by Dani Blum | Friday, March 10, 2024

For most of this year, the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus accounted for an overwhelming majority of Covid cases. But now, an offshoot variant called KP.2 is taking off. The variant, which made up just one percent of cases in the United States in mid-March, now makes up over a quarter.

KP.2 belongs to a subset of Covid variants that scientists have cheekily nicknamed “FLiRT,” drawn from the letters in the names of their mutations. They are descendants of JN.1, and KP.2 is “very, very close” to JN.1, said Dr. David Ho, a virologist at Columbia University. But Dr. Ho has conducted early lab tests in cells that suggest that slight differences in KP.2’s spike protein might make it better at evading our immune defenses and slightly more infectious than JN.1.

While cases currently don’t appear to be on the rise, researchers and physicians are closely watching whether the variant will drive a summer surge.

“I don’t think anybody’s expecting things to change abruptly, necessarily,” said Dr. Marc Sala, co-director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Covid-19 Center in Chicago. But KP.2 will most likely “be our new norm,’” he said. Here’s what to know.

Are you scared yet?

But what we do know is reassuring: Despite the shift in variants, data from the C.D.C. suggests there are only “minimal” levels of the virus circulating in wastewater nationally, and emergency department visits and hospitalizations fell between early March and late April.

“I don’t want to say that we already know everything about KP.2,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Healthcare System. “But at this time, I’m not seeing any major indications of anything ominous.”

The article continues to tell us that while the new strain doesn’t seem as though it will be terribly serious, previous infections may not prove to have triggered as strong an immune response to the new stuff, and that the elderly and immunocompromised need to get their vaccinations updated.