New Covid variant alert with 'unusual' symptoms as doctors issue warning
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info
Health officials have issued a stark warning about a new strain of coronavirus, which comes with unusual symptoms, following a surge in cases.
Irish residents are being urged to self-isolate for two days if they display any signs of Covid, as the new variant is also causing gastrointestinal problems. The variant, known as NB. 1.8.1, has already been identified in the UK, US and Australia.
Experts have emphasised that while previous strains have been associated with flu-like symptoms, NB. 1.8.1 can cause gastrointestinal issues such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and heartburn, reports the Mirror.
Patients who experience bloating, constipation and abdominal pain could also find themselves diagnosed with Covid-19.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has added the variant to its official watch list and suggested that it is more transmissible than other strains.
However, there isn't any evidence to suggest that it causes more severe illnesses.
According to WHO, the strain first appeared in January and by late April it was responsible for around 10.7% of global infections, up from just 2.5% a month earlier.
The strain has seen a rapid rise in Ireland in recent weeks.
According to data from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), the proportion of sequenced Covid samples linked to NB. 1.8.1 jumped from 3.7% to 27.3% in the last five weeks, reports Dublin Live.
The new Covid variant NB. 1.8.1, already dominant in regions of Asia like China and Hong Kong, has been detected in holiday hotspots including Thailand, Egypt, and the Maldives. Dr Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology at Griffith University, highlighted the symptoms: "Common symptoms [of NB.1.8.1] include sore throat, fatigue, fever, mild cough, muscle aches and nasal congestion. Gastrointestinal symptoms may also occur in some cases."
With unseasonal cold symptoms or stomach issues possibly indicating Covid, Irish health authorities advise those feeling ill to stay home until they're symptom-free for 48 hours and to steer clear of high-risk individuals.
Current public health advice in Ireland stresses the importance of self-isolation if exhibiting any signs of Covid, with particular attention given to keeping away from vulnerable individuals until you've been clear of majority or all symptoms for two days.
Covid symptoms to look out for
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
21 minutes ago
- NBC News
MTV's Ananda Lewis Dies at 52
Ananda Lewis, a former MTV VJ, has died at the age of 52. Lakshmi Emory, whom Lewis once described as a 'phenomenal sister' in a birthday message, shared news of her death in a June 11 Facebook post. 'She's free, and in His heavenly arms,' she wrote next to a black-and-white photo of Lewis. 'Lord, rest her soul.' Emory did not share additional details, including Lewis' cause of death. Lewis was an MTV staple in the late '90s, hosting 'Total Request Live' and video countdown show'Hot Zone.' She also hosted her own talk show 'The Ananda Lewis Show' in 2001. Lewis was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in 2019, but later revealed that she opted against the double mastectomy doctors recommended at the time. In a January 2025 op-ed for Essence, Lewis shared that she tried alternative methods to monitor her breast cancer, including cuting out alcohol, sugar, monthly ultrasounds, high-dose vitamin C IVs, hyperbaric chamber sessions and qigong exercise, among others. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she discovered that her tumor had grown and underwent genetically targeted fractionated chemotherapy, which is a treatment that destroys cancer cells without harming healthy ones, according to Cleveland Clinic. However, a PET scan done in October 2023 confirmed that her cancer had progressed to Stage 4 cancer. This time, she shared that she underwent treatment at an integrative facility. While Lewis had previously said she regretted refusing to undergo mammograms out of fear of radiation exposure, she urged the importance of women getting informed and learning about prevention. In her 2025 Essence piece, she wrote, 'Going into 2025, I would say to women: Do everything in your power to avoid my story becoming yours. If I had known what I know now 10 years ago, perhaps I wouldn't have ended up here.' Adding, 'I encourage people to look at the information and studies that exist. Seek them out, learn from them and apply the changes to your life, so that you can continue to thrive and live as long as you can.'
BBC News
5 hours ago
- BBC News
'Life, amidst death, has to continue': Molly Jong-Fast on her new book and watching her mother fade away
BBC Special Correspondent Katty Kay chats with author Molly Jong-Fast about her memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, which tackles the life, legacy, and decline of her mother, Erica Jong. The death of a mother or father is one of the things we don't talk about much in modern life, maybe because it scares us. But it's a universal reality. Nearly all of us will go through it at some point. Molly Jong-Fast is a political commentator and writer for Vanity Fair who has just written a new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother. The book is Jong-Fast's account of her mother and feminist author Erica Jong's descent into dementia, which began the same year that Jong-Fast's husband, professor Matthew Adlai Greenfield, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. The book is an honest, emotional and at times funny account of how Jong-Fast got through that horrible time. Not only was she handling her mother's cognitive decline, Jong-Fast's stepfather was diagnosed with Parkinson's, the world was dealing with Covid and everyone in her orbit was under one roof, including an elderly dog with his own health problems. These are heavy topics, but we found moments of laughter, too, emblematic of Jong-Fast's style. In her memoir, the author explores lying to her children about their father's health, referring to a growth on his pancreas as a "mass", because, "a 'mass' could be anything – a group of people, a group of blood vessels, a group of cockapoos meeting in Central Park for a cockapoo meetup". I really enjoyed this conversation. Her lessons about handling loss and grief, facing the legacy of her mother's fame and the difficult decisions that come with ageing parents are things I think we can all learn from. Watch (or read) more of our discussion below. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Katty Kay: When my mum died, I remember thinking that I've had training up the wazoo for everything in my life, but nobody's given me the guidebook for this. Nobody's said, as your parents get older, they're going to need their diapers changed or that you're going to need to think about the money – let alone anybody helping you with all of the emotions. I'm so glad you wrote this book to help people, but why is it that we've gotten to this position where something that almost everybody goes through, we're left kind of clueless when it comes to it? Molly Jong-Fast: I think there's a lot of shame about getting older. It's why I talk about being sober all the time; I want to destigmatise alcoholism and that's how I feel about this to a certain extent. People don't want to talk about it. People don't want to get older. It's really scary. It only goes one direction and you can't get off. You don't get to skip birthdays. It's just this endless march towards death and nobody knows what happens after you die. What I think was so interesting about this whole experience was that it gets you into this conversation of: Why are we here? What is the point of all of this? Why are we on this planet and what should we be trying to grab from this human experience before it's too late? KK: Having now gone through the last few years and written this book, do you feel like you have lessons to impart? MJF: Because I got sober at 19, I saw the incredible benefit of being able to look at my experience and show it to other people. I got that if you can go through something and share that experience with someone else, they can be helped by it. It's almost Jungian; there's a collective suffering that can be shared and lessened. The thing that I always try to say, especially with my kids, is to not feel bad about stuff. The rest of the world can make you feel bad, OK? But don't make yourself feel bad about things. The other thing I say to people is to just do the best you can. This is not going to look the way you want it to look. Maybe it will! And that's great, too. But just because things don't look the way you want them to doesn't mean it's not the way it's supposed to look. KK: I think some people looking at what you went through would think 'I couldn't bear that.' But you have lovely moments in the book where you write about taking the kids on spring break because it's spring break. And you have to buy groceries and you have to pick them up from college. And that life – amidst death – has to continue. MJF: There's this funny moment, I don't know if this made it into the book, but my husband and I had this thing where his father died and then, two weeks later, my stepfather's sister died – and we were at the same, very small funeral home in Connecticut. And the people who own the funeral home come up to us and they're like [makes a shocked face]. We saw that it was very dark – it was not a great year – but we saw the humour in it. I do think the wonderful thing – and I think you see this in much worse stories of people who are in camps or the stories of people who are in wars – is that your focus becomes very narrow and everything becomes a binary. You either can do this or you can do that. And there's something very clarifying about the binary, which I don't think is a bad thing. KK: You start in the book by saying you have this incredibly intense relationship with your mother and you're part of her and she's part of you. But it becomes pretty clear that the relationship is complicated and not as close as you had wanted it to be and that your mother had incredibly narcissistic tendencies when you were growing up. I think that, for so many people who go through this process, that makes what you have written even more important, because so many people don't have that loving, easy relationship with their parents, and when that moment comes they feel a terrible sense of guilt. MJF: I would guess that, on average, people have worse relationships with their parents than we think they do. Our generation is just going through this period with these parents who we're losing and there is a sense when I talk to these people that they feel guilty. They're sort of stuck and feeling bad. And I definitely felt guilty. I put this in the book, but my husband's shrink says, 'Sometimes, when you have narcissistic parents, you feel worse that it didn't work out.' KK: What did you feel guilty about when your mother started to get dementia and you made the decision to move her into a home? MJF: In my ideal world, my mother would not be an alcoholic and I would move her into my house and she'd be painting and writing poetry and maybe [be] a little dotty. But she'd live in my house. So, I felt very bad. It was not how I wanted it to go. But I also felt that my feeling bad was a useful thing for people to see. I'm not just doing this because I'm an exhibitionist. I'm doing it because I really do think that when you have a relationship that isn't what you want and then you suffer from it, you don't have to. And I'm saying, 'I did it and you don't have to,' is sort of the goal. –-
Daily Record
5 hours ago
- Daily Record
Ohio chemical spill sparks mass evacuations and flight groundings
Authorities confirmed that a 5,000-gallon tank containing nitric acid leaked at the Austin Powder Red Diamond plant in McArthur, Vinton County. Flights have been grounded and residents evacuated as a huge chemical spill at a plant in Ohio led to the release of hazardous plume into the air. Authorities confirmed the incident that occurred on Wednesday, June 11, confirmed that a 5,000-gallon tank containing nitric acid leaked at Austin Powder Red Diamond plant in McArthur, Vinton County, a plant known for making explosives, reports the Mirror. Due to the leak, Vinton County Sheriff's Office issued an "immediate evacuation order" for the surrounding Zaleski area. Flights within 3,700 square miles of airspace have been banned by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. Images from the scene showed a yellow-brown cloud rising above the plant, later confirmed as nitric oxide. Officials at the National Weather Service in Charleston, West Virginia are monitoring the movement of the plume. The extent to which it spreads will dpeend on the wind conditions and how much was released, according to Jackson County Emergency Management Director Robert Czechlewski. "Normally an incident like this will probably last a few hours" he said. Brad Price, an official with the Vinton County Health Department, warned that high exposure to nitric oxide can cause ""symptoms that range from irritation of eyes, skin, nose and throat, to drowsiness and maybe some unconsciousness". A statement from the Austin Powder plant in McArthur said there had been an unexpected release of nitric acid.
