Four cases of the Supercontagious XE Covid variant detected in The Canary Islands

Four cases of the Supercontagious XE Covid variant have been detected in the Canary Islands.

The Health Department of the Canary Islands took to Twitter to announce the new found XE Covid variant cases stating:

“The Health Department notifies four cases of #COVID19 by subvariant XE in the Canary Islands.

The affected people had a favourable evolution without requiring hospital admission and two of them have a history of recent travel outside Spain.

More info:”

Credit: Twitter @SanidadGobCan

📢Sanidad notifica cuatro casos de #COVID19 por subvariante XE en Canarias

👥Las personas afectadas tuvieron una evolución favorable sin precisar ingreso hospitalario y dos de ellas tienen antecedentes de viaje reciente fuera de España.

➡️Más info: https://t.co/HW7CbLUQ7X

— Sanidad Gobcan (@SanidadGobCan) April 22, 2022

They provided a link to their official Governmental website where they had posted a statement that read:

“The Regional Ministry of Health of the Canary Islands Government reports four cases of COVID-19 by subvariant XE, a lineage of the Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants. Three of the affected persons are young and the fourth is a person over 65 years of age. All of them have improved without requiring hospitalisation. Two of the cases were registered in Tenerife and the other two in Gran Canaria, the latter having a history of travel outside of Spain.”

“The subvariant known as XE is the result of the combination of the Omicron variant (BA.1) and the BA.2 sublineage of SARS-Cov2 and, so far, it has not been determined that it is more dominant than the other variants or that it has a different evolution from Omicron.”

“Following confirmation of these first cases, the genomic surveillance network for COVID-19 in the Canary Islands, which includes a protocolised system for the detection, monitoring and control of the presence of the different variants of SARS-Cov2 on the islands, will continue to monitor the disease.”

“This network was set up in March last year, through the Public Health Directorate, and its different controls allow a real x-ray of the incidence of the different strains of the virus in the archipelago to be obtained.”