The epidemic outbreak of Covid-19 is starting to be more and more important all over the world. The culprit for these new rapid spreads of the disease is the Omicron sub-variant, BA.2. More contagious and potentially more dangerous than the original Omicron variant, here’s what we know regarding the BA.2 sublineage.
A sub-lineage that remains very similar to its predecessor
While many countries – including France – have already decided to considerably ease the restrictive measures to combat the spread of Covid-19, outbreaks have resumed in many parts of the world, particularly due to Omicron’s subvariant, BA.2. This is indeed the case in India, Denmark and South Africa, where the subvariant is already the dominant strain of the virus; and it is also spreading at high speed in France and China. If this sub-variant is already very widespread, little is known regarding it.
Sub-lineage of the Omicron variant, it is not known exactly when the BA.2 appeared. But this strain of the virus has been found to be even more transmissible than its predecessor, the BA.1 subvariant. A Danish study notably showed that BA.2 is 1.5 times more contagious than BA.1. According to the scientists, this might be explained by the fact that in addition to the 30 mutations that it shares with BA.1, the BA.2 subvariant has 8 mutations that are unique to it. Additionally, it appears to have the same immune escape profile as its predecessor, which is already highly transmissible.
Regarding the severity of the disease caused by this subvariant, there is so far no evidence that indicates that there is a noticeable difference with its predecessor. In other words – just like the Omicron BA.1 variant – the BA.2 sublineage causes far fewer serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths than the Delta variant. Be that as it may, the experts urge caution, pointing out that it is still too early to say that this sub-variant is really harmless.
A variant certainly more transmissible, but not more worrying
Additionally, it was also found that this new subvariant appears to affect significantly more young people, reported Release. However, health officials are not overly concerned regarding this situation, since the majority of older people are currently vaccinated. This also indicates that vaccines appear to be effective in preventing symptomatic infection once morest this subvariant.
A finding that has been confirmed by several studies, including a preliminary study in Qatar which showed that two doses of the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna effectively protect once morest the different versions of the Omicron variant. While there seems to be nothing particularly worrying regarding the BA.2 sub-lineage, health officials continue to encourage people to be careful and get vaccinated. So while the experts’ fear isn’t really regarding this sub-lineage, they fear that further spread of this strain will give more opportunities for the virus to mutate and engender more dangerous variants.
