White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the subvariant is estimated to account for around 30 per cent of all new cases in the US, and is also the most dominant variant in the country, CNBC reported on Sunday. Fauci said BA.2 is about 60 per cent more transmissible than Omicron, but it does not appear to be more severe.
Fauci said that vaccines and booster shots remain the best means to prevent serious illness from the virus. The variant has already caused a surge in cases in China and parts of Europe.
Maharashtra is now on alert and the state government has issued an advisory urging caution among citizens and the need to follow Covid-appropriate behaviour.
A team of IIT Kanpur team had earlier suggested that India may witness the 4th wave of Covid-19 in June 2022 only for it to peak in August.
Details and symptoms of the variant
- The lesser-known BA.2 variant is also likely to have the same severity as the ‘original’ Omicron strain, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO has emphasised that BA.2 should continue to be monitored as a distinct sub-lineage of Omicron by public health authorities.
- It further added that the initial data from population-level reinfection studies shows that reinfection with BA.2 following infection with BA.1 provides strong protection against reinfection with BA.2.
- There have been concerns about the difficulty in detecting the BA.2 variant, or the stealth sub-variant of Omicron. The new variant misses key mutations in spike protein, which are generally necessary for rapid PCR tests to identify the infection. It combines two sub-variants of the Omicron version of the Covid virus named BA.1 and BA.2.
- The variant primarily affects the upper respiratory tract, as per WHO. However, like Delta, the BA.2 variant does not affect the lungs, eliminating symptoms such as loss of taste or smell, and shortness of breath.
- Patients affected by this variant have reported dizziness and extreme fatigue. These symptoms are likely to appear within two to three days after being infected with the virus. Other symptoms may also include fever, coughing, sore throat, sore hand, muscular fatigue, cold, and elevated heart rate.
Chances of reinfection?
While the omicron variant is associated with increased incidence of reinfections and breakthrough infections, catching this variant of concern may have a silver lining. A recent study published on medRxiv, shows that previous infection with the BA.1 sublineage provides strong protection against its relative BA.2, which is now the most widely circulating strain.
Researchers at the State Serum Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, started to dig deeper on this topic after noticing that while close to two million Danish residents tested positive for Covid-19 between late November and mid-February, only 1,739 reported a reinfection, i.e. two positive tests separated by 20–60 days.
Findings have been consistent with other recent studies, including a
UK survey of reinfections in early February. “If BA.2 arrives in a community late, when the BA.1 omicron wave is nearly over, immunity by omicron infection and/or by boosting is likely to keep BA.2 from driving a second wave,” Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the Vancouver-based University of British Columbia told
Nature journal.
(With inputs from agencies)
