The mu variant of COVID-19 appears to no longer be spreading in the United States.
There have been zero reported new cases of the mu variant in the U.S. over the past seven days, according to data from outbreak.info, which tracks the virus and its variants worldwide. On Monday, Japanese researchers released a study showing that the Pfizer vaccine is 76% effective against this variant, which was originally feared to be more resistant to vaccines and at one point earlier this month was prevalent in 49 states.
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The World Health Organization classifies mu, which was first identified in Colombia, as a “variant of interest” rather than a “variant of concern” such as the highly transmissible delta variant. A total of 4,833 cases have been reported in the U.S, over half of the total mu variant cases worldwide, according to the coronavirus tracker. It peaked on June 19 in the U.S. but has been declining along with all other coronavirus cases as the summer surge appears to taper off.
“Virus strains are competing with one another, and it is definitely survival of the fittest, essentially the virus that can infect more people faster. It is likely that mu was not able to out-compete delta,” Anna Durbin, director of the Center for Immunization Research at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Newsweek.
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Since the outset of the pandemic, several variants have emerged, each with differing degrees of transmissibility and resistance to the vaccines. While the lambda variant, like the mu variant, is a “variant of interest,” the delta, gamma, alpha, and beta variants are all “variants of concern,” according to the WHO. The dominant strain is still the delta variant, which accounts for more than 99% of the new cases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The delta variant accounts for 40% of cases in both the U.S. and worldwide, with over 423,000 cases in the U.S., according to outbreak.info.
Mu is still spreading in other countries but so far accounts for less than 0.5% of cases worldwide.
