COVID-19 News: Worrisome JN.1 Indian Sub-lineage: JN.1.11 That Thailand Medical News Warned About Is Now Increasing In Spread Across India!
Nikhil Prasad Fact checked by:Thailand Medical News Team Jan 16, 2024 3 months, 1 week, 3 days, 19 hours, 47 minutes ago
COVID-19 News: About 11 days ago, Thailand Medical News covered about the emergence of a new worrisome JN.1 spawn that had many mutations on it that was discovered by a variant hunter from Tsinghua University-China.
The worrisome JN.1.11 variant from India
Image credit: Rodrigo de Matos - remodified
This new sub-lineage contained multiple mutations that are concerned with immune evasion including the spike mutations L455S, F456L, V1104L and the NSP3 mutations T1465I G17334T
The new sub-lineages also contained the Orf1a:T2283I mutation and also the mutations C7113T,T22928C,T3565C.
At the time the
COVID-19 News article was published, there were only 11 such sequences identified across India and almost all were from hospitalized patients!
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/breaking-covid-19-news-potentially-even-more-immune-evasive-and-virulent-spawns-of-jn-1-discovered-in-india-expect-more-such-strains-from-india
This sub-lineage has since been designated as JN.1.11.
https://github.com/sars-cov-2-variants/lineage-proposals/issues/1262
What is concerning however is that this new JN.1.11 sub-lineage is fast growing in India and over the last 10 days has now climbed to the third position of among the dominant variants in India, accounting for about 4.5% of all sequences.
https://twitter.com/RajlabN/status/1747037955917529089/photo/1
Also reports show that this new variant is starting to spread globally and has already spread to England and also to Israel!
https://twitter.com/mrmickme/status/1747212361709310324
There are some speculations that the mutations found on this new sub-lineage is not only making the making the new sub-lineage more immune evasive and more infectious and transmissible but also potentially more virulent and pathogenic and possibly driving disease severity similar if not worse than the Delta strain.
Among one of the mutations found on it is the V1104L mutation which was also found on many Delta sub-lineages.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28317-5
Published studies show the V1104L residue falls within a T cell epitope and may increase protein stabilit
y.
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/14/12/2775
There are reasons to believe that this mutation also allows the virus to fight against all kinds of T cell immunity!
https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(20)30166-9
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2001037022003312
Some of the mutations found on the ORF1a and NSP3 of this new JN.1.11 are believed to be involved in inciting cytokine storms and possibly causing damage to the lung tissues. (Studies are currently underway to ascertain this.)
There is also strong suspicions that the India government is not divulging the real COVID-19 situation unfolding in India at the moment.
Many rural hospitals in various states in India are reporting the rise of severe pneumonia and there are even unverified reports that there has been an increase in deaths of people arising from this severe pneumonia infections.
COVID-19 testing in many rural parts of India is literally none-existent and even in some cities, the same goes for government or public hospitals!
Genomic sequencing is also literally non-existent in many rural hospitals and locations in India.
We can definitely expect more worrisome strains to emerge from India as in the case of the Delta variant.
The JN.1.11 sub-lineage is not the only JN.1 spawn that Thailand
Medical News is warning about.
There is also the JN.1.2 sub-lineage that people should be worried about.
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/covid-19-news-jn-1-spawn-jn-1-2-that-spots-the-spike-mutation-m1229i-found-in-infected-minks-likely-to-be-the-next-predominant-variant
Then there is also the JN.1.4, JN.1.6.1, JN.1.1, JN.2, JN.6, JN.7 Jn.8 and JN.9 sub-lineages that we should also be concerned about.
In fact, the JN.1 variant is rapid evolving and spawning so many new sub-lineages with varying mutations and to date there are more than 830 plus of such spawns but only about 40 plus have been identified to possess the right viral fitness and potential to become predominant in circulation.
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/covid-19-news-after-jn-1,-expect-new-spawns-jn-1-1,-jn-1-1-1,-jn-8,-jn-9-and-spawns-with-t572i-mutation-to-continuously-reinfect-till-lethal-strain-em
As such the situation is very dynamic as to what spawns of JN.1 could become fast dominant.
But rest assured that this current COVID-19 wave will be running for a long time with various spawns of JN.1 set to take over the ongoing havoc. Countries claiming to have reached the peak are simply lying or downplaying the situation.
Also, expect those infections with the JN.1 variant to unlikely offer any immunity protection against the emerging and new JN.1 spawns and expect some of the newer JN.1 spawns to display the anomaly of not even being able to offer protection against getting reinfected with the very same sub-lineage!
We are actually entering a very critical phase of the ongoing pandemic and while many still assume that asymptomatic or mild infections are ok, we can expect to see an increase in fatal outcomes in many infected with the JN.1 variant and its spawns weeks or months after so called ‘recovery’ even if vaccinated!
Thailand
Medical News will be providing more updates on the JN.1.11 variant and also about the newer emerging JN.1 sub-lineages.
For the latest
COVID-19 News, keep on logging to Thailand
Medical News.
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