New COVID sub-variables are becoming dominant all over the world not only more contagious than previous variants and sub-variants—They can also cause more severe illness.
That is an ominous sign if, as experts predict, there is a new global COVID wave in the coming months. It’s one thing to combat the proliferation of infections that mostly lead to mild illness. Cases rise but hospitalizations and deaths do not. But the rise of a serious illness can also lead to a large number of hospitalizations and deaths.
It could be like 2020 or 2021, it all repeats itself. The big difference is that we now have easy access to safe and effective vaccines. And the vaccine still works, even against new sub-variants.
A new study from Ohio State University was the first red flag. A team led by Shan-Lu Liu, co-director of HSU’s Viruses and Emerging Pathogens Program, modeled new SARS-CoV-2 sub-variable including BQ.1 and its close cousins, BQ.1.1.
The team confirmed what we already knew: BQ.1 and other new sub-variants, most of which are children of the BA.4 and BA.5 forms of the Omicron variant, are highly contagious. And the same mutations that make them transmissible also render them unrecognizable to antibodies produced by monoclonal therapies, rendering those therapies useless.
That’s reason enough for attention as BQ.1 and its cousins outperformed BA.4 and BA.5 and became dominant in more countries and states. But then Liu and his teammates also tested the “scenting abilities” of the sub-variants. That is, how well they combine with our cells. Liu told The Daily Beast: “The fusion of the virus and the cell membrane is an important step in the viral entry process.
In general, the greater the fertility, the more severe the disease. Liu and his colleagues “observed increased cell fusion in several novel Omicron subvariables compared with their respective parent subvariables,” they write in their study, which appears directly. online on October 20 and is still under peer review at New England Journal of Medicine.
If these new extra variables are actually easier to propagate and More seriously, they could reverse an important trend as the COVID pandemic enters its fourth year. So far, the trend has been for each successive major or minor variant to be more contagious but cause less severe disease.
That trend, combined with widespread vaccinations and new therapies, has led to what scientists call a “separation” of infections and deaths. COVID cases sometimes spike when some new variant or new, highly contagious sub-variant becomes dominant. But because these new forms of SARS-CoV-2 cause less severe illness, deaths have not increased much.
That separation, coupled with the availability of vaccines and therapies, has allowed most people around the world to return to normal in the past year or so. If BQ.1 or another highly virulent subvariant recombines infections and deaths, that new normal could become a new nightmare. Ali Mokdad, a professor of health measurement science at the University of Washington Health Institute who was not involved in the OSU study, summed up how.
We may have seen the first recall. Since the secondary variables have just begun to seriously compete for dominance in recent months, epidemiologists have been monitoring the COVID statistics carefully to detect any effects. in the real world.
Singapore is a wrong move. The tiny Asian city has seen a rapid, up-and-down rise in cases this month that some experts initially feared could be linked to a dangerous new side variable. But the Ministry of Health of this country very quickly decoded the virus samples and determined that BA.5 was the culprit. Singapore’s high immunization and booster rates — 92% of residents getting primary shots and 80% boosters — reduced BA.5 gains without a spike in deaths.
But then there is Germany, where cases also increased this month. The German authorities have yet to determine what causes the variant or sub-variant, but it is worth noting that BQ.1 is spreading rapidly throughout Europe.
And there are signs of capital recovery in Germany. In October, the country recorded 175,000 new cases per day – matching the peak of the previous wave in July. But an average of 160 Germans died every day during the worst week of the current surge, while just 125 died every day during the worst week of the summer spike. “We can see similar patterns in other European countries… and in the US,” says Mokdad.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the latest COVID subvariables. And their real-world impact won’t be noticeable until we get good data from Germany. “It is very important to closely monitor new variants and study their properties,” says Liu.
But one thing is clear. For all their transferability and generativeness, the new subvariables not yet significantly escape the immunogenic effects of leading vaccines. And the latest “bivalent” boosters, specially formulated for BA.4 and BA.5, will maintain vaccine efficacy as long as the adjuvants are closely related to Omicron.
Get vaccinated and update your boosters. Can’t stress this too much. Yes, BQ.1 and its cousins exhibit some alarming qualities that could bend the pandemic’s arc back to widespread death and disruption.
But only if you are unvaccinated or slow on your boosters.
