A new COVID-19 variant is spreading this late spring. Kp2, also known by the nickname FLiRT, evolved from the Omicron variant. This particular strain now makes up nearly a third of US cases according to the CDC.

Keeley Morris, a senior epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Health says the increase in cases is nothing new.

“Anytime these new variants emerge, we’re always a little concerned that there might be an increase in severity that has happened in the past. But for these variants so far, we don’t have any any indication that they are severe,” Morris said. “Typically what happens is that they’re just more immune invasive. We start to see an increase in cases because people don’t have that underlying protection that they get from being vaccinated. This is a common occurrence for any viruses and we are getting very used to it now for COVID-19.”

Morris also says people over 65 or immunocompromised should get a second dose of the vaccine that came out in September, at least four months after their previous dose.

“We’ve started to target particular variants with the fall vaccines that come out every year. That makes them sort of especially effective against whatever variant is circulating,” Morris said. “We do want to keep an eye on what’s currently circulating in the community when we make vaccination decisions. But if folks look back, you’ll actually see that at this time last year we had other variants that were emerging. So this isn’t uncommon for around this time of year.”

Morris says it’s a hard to know specifically how many people in Minnesota might have these variants. Although the Minnesota Department of Health is keeping an eye on what proportion virus sequences belong to new emerging variants. At the moment of this publication Morris says we’re sitting around 15% of our sequenced specimens belonging to FLiRT variants.

For more information about the situation with the COVID-19 variant you can read more here. For other stories about COVID-19 you can read more here.