{"id":1406138,"date":"2022-03-29T00:45:08","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T04:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1406138"},"modified":"2022-03-29T00:45:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T04:45:13","slug":"explainer-omicron-stealth-covid-variant-ba-2-now-dominant-globally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/explainer-omicron-stealth-covid-variant-ba-2-now-dominant-globally\/","title":{"rendered":"Explainer-Omicron \u2018stealth\u2019 COVID variant BA.2 now dominant globally"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fexplainer-omicron-stealth-covid-variant-ba-2-now-dominant-globally%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1406138&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div>FILE PHOTO: Policemen and staff workers get tested for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a makeshift nucleic acid testing centre inside barriers of an area under lockdown amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in Shanghai, China March 24, 2022. REUTERS\/Aly Song<\/div>\n<p>March 29, 2022<\/p>\n<p>By Jennifer Rigby and Julie Steenhuysen<\/p>\n<p>(Reuters) \u2013     A sub-variant of the highly transmissible Omicron version of coronavirus known as BA.2 is now dominant worldwide, prompting surges in many countries in Europe and Asia and raising concern over the potential for a new wave in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>Below is a summary of what is known about BA.2.<\/p>\n<p>MORE TRANSMISSIBLE <\/p>\n<p>BA.2 now represents nearly 86% of all sequenced cases, according to the World Health Organization. It is even more transmissible than its highly contagious Omicron siblings, BA.1 and BA.1.1, however the evidence so far suggests that it is no more likely to cause severe disease.<\/p>\n<p>As with the other variants in the Omicron family, vaccines are less effective against BA.2 than against previous variants like Alpha or the original strain of coronavirus, and protection declines over time. However, according to UK Health Security Agency data, protection is restored by a booster jab, particularly for preventing hospitalisation and death. https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/business\/healthcare-pharmaceuticals\/covid-booster-provides-protection-over-65s-after-15-weeks-uk-data-2022-03-24\/ <\/p>\n<p>GLOBAL PICTURE<\/p>\n<p>The rise of BA.2 has been blamed for recent surges in China as well as record infections in European countries like Germany and the UK. Yet some European countries are now seeing a slower uptick in new cases, or even a decline. <\/p>\n<p>BA.2 has been called the \u201cstealth variant\u201d because it is slightly harder to track. A missing gene in BA.1 allowed it to be tracked by default through a common PCR test. BA.2 and another sibling, BA.3, which is also increasing in prevalence but is currently at low levels, can only be found by genomic sequencing, which some countries do more of than others. <\/p>\n<p>REINFECTIONS <\/p>\n<p>A key concern about BA.2 was whether it could re-infect people who had already had BA.1, particularly as a number of countries seemed to be experiencing \u201cdouble peaks\u201d in infection rates surprisingly close together. But data from both the UK and Denmark have shown that while Omicron can reinfect people who had other variants, such as Delta, only a handful of BA.2 reinfections in people who had BA.1 have been found so far among tens of thousands of cases.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<p>Scientists say a possible explanation for the recent rise in BA.2 could be that the global uptick happened at the same time that many countries lifted public health interventions. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn some ways, it could just be that BA.2 was the variant that was circulating when all these people stopped wearing masks,\u201d said Dr Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. <\/p>\n<p>As such, other U.S. experts such as Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, said it was \u201ca little too early\u201d to call whether the U.S. too would see a significant BA.2 wave.<\/p>\n<p>But whatever the reason for BA.2\u2019s rise, scientists said it was a reminder that the virus continues to cause harm, particularly among unvaccinated, under-vaccinated and vulnerable populations.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is still a huge public health problem and it is going to continue to be,\u201d said Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh.<\/p>\n<p> (Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Julie Steenhuysen, editing by Michele Gershberg)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FILE PHOTO: Policemen and staff workers get tested for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a makeshift nucleic acid testing centre inside barriers of an area under lockdown amid the coronavirus<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1406138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1406138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1406138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1406138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1406138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}