As flu season nears, so do new COVID-19 variants. A newly discovered COVID strain known as XEC continues to spread rapidly across multiple countries, including the United States and California. First appearing in late June in Berlin,

A new COVID variant, XEC, has arrived just before fall. The new variant has sprouted from the omicron variant that was first identified in late 2021. It’s possible that XEC may “become the dominant subvariant over the winter,” Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, told the BBC.