“It’s premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory,” said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus about the fight against Covid yesterday.
“This virus is dangerous, and it continues to evolve before our very eyes,” said Ghebreyesus in opening remarks at the organization’s weekly Covid update. “WHO is currently tracking four sub-lineages of the Omicron variant of concern, including BA.2.” Preliminary findings seem to indicate that BA.2 is more transmissible, but not more virulent, than the original Omicron.
During the briefing, the Director-General and other WHO officials attempted to warn governments not to relax their guard, particularly when it came to Omicron. Although it has not yet been recognized as such on the WHO website, the WHO Covid-19 technical lead stated on Monday that BA.2 is an Omicron variant of concern.
In recent days, the average number of daily Covid cases has decreased in numerous nations, including the United States, which has decreased by 44% in the last 14 days. The virus, however, is evolving, according to WHO officials.
On November 26, 2021, the group was one of the first respected entities to issue a warning about Omicron, naming it a variety of concern. Several further Omicron lineages have also been discovered.
BA.1.1, BA.2, and BA.3 have joined the original Omicron, now known as BA.1. According to WHO's most current epidemiological update, which was released yesterday, all of them are being tracked by WHO under the umbrella of "Omicron." BA.2 is the most worrying thus far.
“BA.2-designated sequences have been submitted to [infection tracking site] GISAID from 57 countries to date,” according to the report, “with the weekly proportion of BA.2 relative to other Omicron sequences rising to over 50% during the last six weeks in several countries.”
Epidemiologists say it's still early to comprehend BA.2, let alone BA.1.1 and BA.3, about which there's very little knowledge.
“We still don’t know everything about the virus,” said WHO Covid-19 Technical Lead Maria Van Kerkhove. “We still don’t know everything about the variants and the future trajectory of that.”
One thing that is probable however, according to Van Kerkhove, is that “Omicron is becoming dominant worldwide. It’s overtaking Delta in a number of countries around the world.”
According to OutbreakInfo.com, which uses GISAID data, these countries include the Philippines, Denmark, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and India.
“Since Omicron was first identified just 10 weeks ago, almost 90 million cases have been reported to WHO – more than were reported in the whole of 2020,” said the Director-General.
A Danish preprint study of 8,541 household cases conducted in late December and Early January indicated “a transmission advantage of Omicron BA.2 over BA.1.” BA.2 has since come to account for the majority of new daily cases in the country.
The study discovered "an increased susceptibility for both unvaccinated, fully vaccinated and booster-vaccinated individuals in BA.2 households," as well as "the pattern of increased transmissibility was not for fully-vaccinated and booster-vaccinated primary cases."
Everyone, regardless of immunization status, is more vulnerable to contracting BA.2 from another infected person in the house. However, persons who were completely vaccinated or boosted were less likely to infect others in their families, according to the study.
The study bolsters the argument that, as Ghebreyesus said Monday, “Variants of SARS-CoV-2 may continue to escape neutralizing antibodies induced by vaccines against prior variants.”
Instead of playing whack-a-mole with new strains, WHO experts said this week that a more comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 vaccination that protects against all varieties should be developed.
“The reservoir of beta coronaviruses is large,” warned the WHO Director-General, “and new crossovers to humans is likely. If we prepare now, the time required for large scale vaccine manufacture will be reduced and lives will be saved.”
