contagiousness

One reason for concern: Bird flu and seasonal flu are capable of gene trading, so if they ended up in the same body at the same time, bird flu might end up with genes that boost its contagiousness.

Today, many have a different perception of COVID's contagiousness, leading some athletes to question the resurgence of the cardboard beds for the Paris Games.

“I think most people are most contagious when they have diarrhea, and when the diarrhea resolves the contagiousness goes away,” Roberts says.

But EG.5, which has also been called Eris, does not appear to have any new capacities when it comes to its contagiousness, its symptoms or its likelihood of causing severe illness.

And in medicine, it has already analyzed all of the genetic mutations of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID—cutting the time that calculation takes from a week to a day—to understand how those tweaks affect the virus’s contagiousness.