This new version would already be present in places in Asia and Europe.
The WHO recommended this Monday that health experts investigate the characteristics of a new version of Omicron to determine its possible effects.
The BA.2, descendant of BA.1 -original version of Ómicron-, “is different in some mutations”, pointed out the World Health Organization in his web page. Included in the spike protein or also known as spike.
Nevertheless, there is no evidence that it is more virulent, spreads faster, or is more or less immune to the vaccine than BA.1.
So far its presence has been detected in India, Denmark and Great Britain, records the Washington Post.
“The good news is that we only have three [casos]”, stated the director of the Human Infectious Diseases Research Center at Houston Methodist Hospital, James Musser.
However, and although he has not personally seen an increase, the expert does declare that this new version of the variant deserves attention and care, since very little is known regarding it.
Kristen Nordlund, spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, in English), reported that “although the cases of this version have increased, the proportion remains low”.
Anders Fomsgaard, a virologist at the State Serum Institute in Denmark, said that BA.2 has become “the dominant form of the virus”, thus reaching 65% of new cases in that country.
This difference with the North American statistics would be due to the type of detection used by Denmark where sequential genome sampling is used in confirmed cases, according to the slogan CNN.
Fomsgaard, for his part, said he was not worried regarding BA.2 since so far there have been no major differences with BA.1, the original version of Ómicron.
international news outlet, Al Jazeera, assured that the United Kingdom Health Security Agency has already identified more than 400 cases of this version.
What yes, several scientists have managed to differentiate is that it is one more virus “secretive” since it has genetic traits that make it more difficult to identify in PCR tests.