The Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands reports four cases of Covid-19 due to the XE subvariant, a lineage of the Ómicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants.
Three of the affected individuals are young, and the fourth is over 65 years old. All have had a favorable evolution without requiring hospital admission. Two of the cases were registered in Tenerife, and the other two in Gran Canaria, with the latter having a history of travel outside of Spain.
The XE subvariant, as it is known, is the result of the combination of the ómicron variant (BA.1) and the BA.2 sublineage of SARS-Cov2, and, so far, it has not been determined to be more dominant than the other variants or to have a different evolution than that of Omicron.
Monitoring in the genomic surveillance network
After confirming these first cases, the Ministry of Health reports that monitoring will continue from the genomic surveillance network for Covid-19 in the Canary Islands, which includes a protocolized system for the detection, monitoring, and control of the presence of the different variants of SARS-Cov2 in the Islands.
This network was launched in March of last year, through the Directorate of Public Health, its different controls allow obtaining a real radiography of the incidence of the different strains of the virus in the Archipelago.