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US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it was tracking a new 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, according to Reuters.
"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.
Early analysis indicates that the new variant "will have equal or greater escape than XXB.1.5 from antibodies elicited by pre-Omicron and first-generation Omicron variants," Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center said in a slide deck published on Thursday.
The Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 is the strain targeted by vaccines in current Covid-19 booster shots.
Bloom's slides note that the most likely scenario is that BA.2.86 is less transmissible than current dominant variants, so never spreads widely, but more sequencing data is needed.