This new COVID-19 subvariant is prevalent in 10 countries — and is more transmissible.
As the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) reported on Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a new report this week showing that the omicron subvariant BA.2 now accounts for more than 1 in 5 new coronavirus infections detected worldwide, and the variant is rising both in countries where cases are increasing and declining.
As the American Medical Association explains, the BA.2 variant is sometimes referred to as “stealth” omicron because it has genetic mutations that could make it harder to distinguish from the delta variant using PCR tests, as compared to the original version of omicron.
BA.2 is now prevalent in 10 countries: Bangladesh, Brunei, China, Denmark, Guam, India, Montenegro, Nepal, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The WHO says that early evidence indicates that the variant is more transmissible, but at this point there is no evidence that BA.2 is more harmful, and vaccines seem to be just as effective against it as they are against the original omicron strain.
New research suggests that BA.2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as previous variants such as delta, as reported by CNN.
According to a preprint study, researchers said that “our data suggest the possibility that BA.2 would be the most concerned variant to global health … we propose that BA.2 should be recognised as a unique variant of concern, and this SARS-CoV-2 variant should be monitored in depth.”
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Data received by the WHO as of February 14 showed that the number of global new COVID-19 cases reported has continued to fall, with 2.7 million new cases last week, a 16 percent decline compared with the previous week. The number of new deaths reported also fell, with 81,000 new deaths reported last week, a 10 percent decline as compared to the previous week.
As medical news site Healio reported last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun reporting the proportion of COVID-19 cases in the United States caused by BA.2, and although the subvariant accounted for just 3.6 percent of infections in the country for the week ending February 5, that percentage is triple the amount it accounted for the week prior.
Figures presented by the The New York Times on Thursday indicated that infections are climbing in Belarus, Latvia, and Slovakia. Cases have risen 79 percent in two weeks in Russia.
CIDRAP adds that this week South Korea’s daily infections have soared past 90,000 for the first time, Hong Kong broke its daily case total by hitting 4,000, Singapore tallied a new daily high of more than 19,000 new cases, and Indonesia also reported a record high, with daily cases surpassing 57,000.
In a live Q&A on Wednesday, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, warned that testing rates have changed around that world and that could be skewing numbers. “We need to be careful about interpreting this downward trend; it’s likely that there is a large number of cases that we’re missing,” she said. She is also concerned that the death tallies are still very high. “At this point in the pandemic when we have tools that can save people’s lives, it is far, far too many.”
For now, the WHO is still concerned that there is too much virus circulating at an intense level. Van Kerkhove warned, “If you have huge numbers of cases like we are seeing, the opportunity for even more variants is higher.”
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