(VOVWORLD) - US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it was tracking a new, highly mutated lineage of the virus that causes COVID-19.
The lineage is named BA.2.86, and has been detected in the United States, Denmark and Israel, the CDC said in a post on messaging platform X.
"As we learn more about BA.2.86, CDC's advice on protecting yourself from COVID-19 remains the same," the agency said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) earlier on Thursday said in a post on X that it had classified BA.2.86 as a "variant under monitoring" due to the large number of mutations it carries.
The WHO said that, so far, only a few sequences of the variant have been reported from a handful of countries.