--- title: COVID-19 Variants BQ.1 and BQ.1.1: What to Know description: Two new COVID-19 variants, BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, are spreading fast in the U.S. Here's what to know about strains BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. canonical: https://time.com/6222686/covid-19-new-subvariants-bq1-bq11/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-10-17T20:27:13.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:40:49.152Z article:section: Health og:title: COVID-19 Variants BQ.1 and BQ1.1 Are Gaining Steam. Here's What to Know og:description: They're starting to spread in the U.S. og:url: https://time.com/6222686/covid-19-new-subvariants-bq1-bq11/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt66c762ca763947ff/698a367fb21a9c5611506854/omicron-booster.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: COVID-19 Omicron Booster og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: COVID-19 Variants BQ.1 and BQ1.1 Are Gaining Steam. Here's What to Know twitter:description: They're starting to spread in the U.S. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt66c762ca763947ff/698a367fb21a9c5611506854/omicron-booster.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # COVID-19 Variants BQ.1 and BQ1.1 Are Gaining Steam. Here's What to Know > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=c75eef8a-b58f-4ce9-8d08-ede4b36d6c24&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats [Watch (HLS stream): These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cuwedOEw.m3u8) (5:30)  _Published 2022-07-29. Abbot’s Pandemic Defense Coalition is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientists around the world together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world, searching for mutations, and so far they managed to alert the world to several that have swept the globe—including Gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa._  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Oct 17, 2022 8:27 PM UTC Abbot’s Pandemic Defense Coalition is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientists around the world together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world, searching for mutations, and so far they managed to alert the world to several that have swept the globe—including Gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa.  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Oct 17, 2022 8:27 PM UTC With another [potential COVID-19 surge looming](https://time.com/6221152/covid-19-surge-winter-2022/), experts are turning their attention to a pair of new variants that are steadily spreading: BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. Both BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 descended from BA.5, an Omicron subvariant that currently accounts for about 68% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. But BA.5’s relatives are quickly gaining ground. BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 each accounted for 5.7% of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. during the week ending Oct. 15, [according to data](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Combined, that’s about 11% of new cases nationwide. In New York and New Jersey, the total proportion was closer to 20%. A few weeks ago, these variants barely showed up on the CDC’s tracker, which suggests they’re able to spread fast. Of the two, BQ.1.1 is more concerning, says Dr. Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a close watcher of COVID-19 research. Both have a number of mutations relative to BA.5, but BQ.1.1 is “just riddled with troublesome mutations” that could “pose a threat to our immune system’s response,” Topol says. If there’s any good news about BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, it’s related to vaccination. The new [Omicron-specific boosters](https://time.com/6210478/cdc-fall-booster-shots-omicron/) were designed to target BA.4 and BA.5, and [preliminary research suggests](https://time.com/6221741/pfizer-bivalent-booster-antibodies-omicron/) they stoke an effective immune response. Since BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are both related to BA.5, the new shots will “almost certainly” provide some cross protection, White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci [told CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-variant-bq-1-omicron-cdc-estimates/). That’s yet another reason to get boosted, which [less than 10% of eligible Americans have reportedly done so far](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/us/politics/covid-booster-shots.html). It’s too soon to say exactly how the bivalent boosters will work against newer strains like these, but Topol encourages anyone eligible to get one. “That’s the best thing you can do right now to arm up against any of these new variants,” Topol says. “Just keep your immune system as primed and ready as possible.” More research is needed about BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, but a [study](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.15.507787v3.full) posted online in October (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) warned that “current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not provide sufficiently broad protection against infection” as the virus continues to evolve. The researchers found that BQ.1.1 is able to evade antibodies from past BA.5 infections, which suggests it may also be able to dodge protection from vaccines. The study also found that monoclonal antibody drugs—including Evusheld, which is used to protect people who are immunocompromised and do not respond well to COVID-19 vaccines—are less effective against BQ.1.1, compared to earlier strains of the virus. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also [recently warned health care providers](https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-releases-important-information-about-risk-covid-19-due-certain-variants-not-neutralized-evusheld) that Evusheld may not neutralize all variants of SARS-CoV-2. While vaccines and boosters are currently the best tools we have to fight COVID-19, the emergence of the BQ variants is further proof that they’re not enough to fully shield people from sickness. If an evasive variant like BQ.1 or BQ.1.1 spreads widely this winter, and some lines of defense are rendered less effective, other precautions like masking and avoiding crowded indoor areas may be necessary to protect against infection. ## Transcript Finding a new virus or different strains of an existing one is like searching for a needle in a haystack. And when the haystack is, as big as the planet, it takes a really good microscope and a large coordinate a team. here is a scientist to dreams of the pandemics were living with like stars Cove to or covid-19. And that's where we're trying to understand what could potentially become the next pandemic in the future for the painful. Few years that we've all lived through this another pandemic. So we need to do to learn the lessons and not reinvent the wheel. After March of 2020 and wave after wave of new variants of covid-19, researchers realize they needed a better way to stay ahead of a virus that doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon, Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition, is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientist together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world and searching for mutations so far they managed to alert the world to several that have Globe including gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa. The whole process start to finish begins with a collaborator in a site that collecting samples from people who've been tested for covid and once they get a result, I want to know what strain was present in the sample after an inactivation step. We take the sample itself and remove everything else about the sample of stuff. For the nucleic acid, which is where the Genome of the material that we can use to either determine how much is there a virus, or we can use that material to the sequence and determine the coronavirus is constantly mutating, but not all of its changes are important. One of the most difficult aspects of staying ahead of the virus is figuring out which of these could become a threat to Public Health. The virus is in charge here. It's still surprising us. Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition is a network of experts in infectious disease, genetic sequencing, phylogenetics and epidemiology they have more than a dozen Partners. On five continents, who work to collect samples, test them, and share the data among themselves and with other public health, and political leaders around the world. Researchers say the data collected from sequencing can help them to ensure that tests for detecting the virus continue to work. So people will know when they are infected. Even with newer variance and take proper safety measures like isolating and wearing masks to buy having a network eyes in the field boots on the ground that will spot the trans. Identify the cases enable us in real time to share information, sequence, samples. And also. Rebuild diagnostic test that can then be distributed background or seen something in South Paulo are we also seeing it in Thailand? That type of information is critical to have quickly so that different countries can prepare and respond. We're building this coke capability and capacity at our partner sites around the world as it is limited and need worshipping of samples. That information is shared through the cloud, excetera, as of November 2021 Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition has analyzed over 1.4 million sequences from 63 different variants and it's clear they won't be done anytime soon. And silently, once we have all that amount of data, we don't have a pipeline of five, a Matic tools that can quickly identify if maybe there's just a Test for it or maybe there's something that's completely novel. And that's where diagnostic tests are really important early on. As we have Dal, you ate that and help Public Health responses accordingly. This is one of the main focuses of the Abbot pandemic defense Coalition, is to democratize the knowledge and the expertise that we've developed over the decades here, to our partners, around the world to build the next generation of virologist. A virus Hunter is an epidemiologist. I think that's critical preventing the next. 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