Close Monitoring of New COVID-19 Variant with Multiple Mutations, WHO Says

The World Health Organization and the US health authorities announced on Friday that they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, even though the "potential impact of its multiple mutations is not yet known."

The World Health Organization has decided to classify the new variant "within the category of variants under monitoring due to the large number (more than 30) of spike protein changes" present on its surface, which plays a crucial role in the virus's entry into human cells, according to the organization's epidemiological bulletin dedicated to the COVID-19 pandemic, published on Thursday night.

So far, this new variant has been detected in Israel, Denmark, and the United States.