'It’s not gone. It’s changing. It’s killing': The COVID variants the WHO is watching closely

While the height of the pandemic may be over, the virus that causes COVID-19 continues to mutate with multiple variants circulating in every country.

Yet despite this, testing and surveillance have decreased, with experts urging people to keep taking the threat of this disease seriously.

"The world has moved on from COVID, and in many respects, that's good because people are able to stay protected and keep themselves safe, but this virus has not gone anywhere. It's circulating. It's changing, it's killing, and we have to keep up," Maria Van Kerkhove, the COVID-19 technical lead at the World Health Organization (WHO), told Euronews Next.

All the variants circulating today are sublineages of Omicron, a highly transmissible variant of COVID-19 that first emerged two years ago.

One sublineage, EG.5, also nicknamed Eris, currently represents more than half of the COVID-19 variants circulating globally. It was declared as a variant of interest by WHO back in August.

Cases of EG.5 increased over the summer, but it was recently outpaced in the United States by a closely related subvariant called HV.1. This subvariant now accounts for 29 per cent of the COVID-19 cases in the US, according to the latest figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"HV.1 is essentially a variant that's derived from EG.5.1 (and previously XBB.1.5) that's just accumulating a few mutations that allow it to better infect people who have immunity to SARS-CoV-2," Andrew Pekosz, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University in the US, told Euronews Next.

Pekosz, who studies the replication of respiratory viruses, said that these variants likely emerged as random mutations as part of the natural evolution