Parents often bask in the glow of their children’s accomplishments, so if SARS-CoV-2 variants were like people, BA.2.86 would be busting its buttons right about now. [JAMA]

BA.2.86’s spawn, JN.1, has become the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant in the US, status its parent variant never achieved. Fortunately, although COVID-19 cases have surged, hospitalizations and deaths from the disease are still considerably lower than they were the same time a year earlier.

When BA.2.86 joined the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron family last summer, it grabbed pandemic trackers’ attention because it was so different from its progenitor, BA.2. Compared with BA.2, BA.2.86’s spike protein carries more than 30 mutations, suggesting that it might spread more easily than its predecessors.

But even armed with those new mutations, BA.2.86 failed to dominate the other subvariants. Through early January of this year, BA.2.86 never exceeded much more than a 3% share of circulating SARS-CoV-2 subvariants in the US, according to Nowcast estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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