New COVID-19 subvariant becoming dominant around the world More contagious than previous variants and subvariants—They can also cause more serious illness.
This is an ominous sign if, as experts predict, there will be a new global wave of COVID in the coming months. Surviving a surge in infections is one of those things that mostly lead to mild illness.Hospitalizations and Deaths, Despite More Cases please do notBut a surge in serious illness can also lead to a surge in hospitalizations and deaths.
It may be like 2020 or 2021. The big difference is now easier access to safe and effective vaccines. And the vaccine is also effective against new subspecies.
new research The first red flag comes from Ohio State University. The team, led by Shan-Lu Liu, Co-Director of HSU’s Viruses and Emerging Pathogens Program, New SARS-CoV-2 subvariants Including BQ.1 and its immediate family, BQ.1.1.
The team confirmed what we already knew. BQ.1 and other new subvariants, most of which are descendants of his BA.4 and BA.5 forms of Omicron variants, are highly contagious. And the same mutations that make them so contagious prevent the antibodies produced by monoclonal therapies from recognizing them, rendering those therapies useless.
This is reason enough to pay close attention to BQ.1 and its cousins as they beat out BA.4 and BA.5 and become dominant in more countries and states. But then Liu and his teammates also checked the “fusion” of the subvariants. That is, how well they fuse into our own cells. “The fusion of the virus and cell membrane is a key step in virus entry,” Liu told The Daily Beast.
In general, the higher the confluency, the more severe the disease. Liu and his colleagues wrote in their study, “We observed increased intercellular fusion in several new omicron subvariants compared to their respective parental subvariants.” New England Journal of Medicine.
If these new subvariants are indeed highly contagious When More severely, important trends could be reversed as the COVID pandemic accelerates into its fourth year. The historical trend is that each successive major or subvariant is more contagious but less severe.
This trend, combined with widespread vaccination and new treatments, has led to what scientists call “decoupling” of infections and deaths. COVID cases occasionally spike when a new, highly contagious variant or subvariant becomes dominant. However, these new forms of SARS-CoV-2 are less severe, so the death toll will not increase significantly.
This decoupling, combined with the availability of vaccines and treatments, has allowed most people around the world to return to some form of normality in the past year or so. If BQ.1 or another highly confluent variant recombines infection and death, that new normal could become a new nightmare. “More hospitalizations and more deaths,” summarized Ali Mokdad, a professor of health index science at the National Institute of Health.
The first recombination may have already been seen. As new variants began to seriously compete for dominance in recent months, epidemiologists watched his COVID stats closely to identify real impacts.
Singapore was a false flag. The tiny Asian city-state has seen a rapid spike in cases this month, with experts worried it might involve a dangerous new subspecies. However, the country’s Ministry of Health quickly sequenced a number of virus samples and determined that BA.5 was the culprit. and 80% boosted) suppressed the BA.5 spike without a large spike in deaths.
However, there is Germany, where cases have surged again this month. German authorities have not yet identified which subspecies or variants are responsible, but it is worth noting that BQ.1 is spreading rapidly across Europe.
And there are signs of reunification in Germany. In October, the country registered as many as 175,000 new cases per day. This is comparable to the previous wave peak in July. But an average of 160 Germans died each day during the worst week of the current surge, compared with just 125 deaths per day during the worst week of the summer surge. We see the same pattern in European countries … and even in the United States,” Mokdad said.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the latest COVID variant. And until we have good data from Germany, their real-world impact won’t be noticed.”It’s important to closely monitor new variants and study their properties,” he said. says.
But one thing is clear.New subvariants for all contagious and fusogenic not It largely evaded the immune effects of major vaccines. Also, modern ‘bivalent’ boosters specifically formulated for BA.4 and BA.5 should maintain vaccine efficacy as long as the major subvariant is closely related to Omicron.
Get vaccinated and keep your boosters up to date. This cannot be overemphasized. Yes, BQ.1 and its cousins exhibit some surprising qualities that could set the pandemic arc back on widespread death and chaos.
But only if you haven’t been vaccinated or your boosters are way behind.
