“It’s premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory,”Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, spoke yesterday about fighting Covid.
“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 results suggest that BA.2 may be more transmissible but not more virulent than the original Omicron.
The briefing was attended by the Director-General and other WHO officials. They warned countries not to relax, particularly in relation to Omicron. The WHO Covid-19 technical leader is not yet listed on the WHO website. On Monday, Omicron will take over BA.2 IsA variant of concern.
The average number of daily Covid cases has declined in many countries of late — including the U.S., Which is downOver the last 14 days, 44%. However, WHO officials warn that the virus is still evolving.
This organization was among the first to raise alarm about Omicron. It designated it a variant of concern in November 2021. Many other Omicron lineages were identified since then.
BA.1.1, BA.2 (now BA.3) have been added to the original Omicron. They are all being monitored by WHO, who falls under the umbrella of “Omicron,” according to WHO’s most recent Epidemiological updateYesterday, a new version of. BA.2 is by far the most worrying.
“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 early days in terms of understanding BA.2, much less BA.1.1 and BA.3, about which very little information is available.
“We still don’t know everything about the virus,”Maria Van Kerkhove (Technical Lead, WHO Covid-19) “We still don’t know everything about the variants and the future trajectory of that.”
However, one thing is certain: According toVan Kerkhove is that “Omicron is becoming dominant worldwide. It’s overtaking Delta in a number of countries around the world.”
These countries include According toOutbreakInfo.com, which extracts data from GISAID: 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,”According to the Director-General.
A Danish preprint study8541 households cases were conducted in late December or early January “a transmission advantage of Omicron BA.2 over BA.1.”Since then, BA.2 has been responsible for most of the new daily cases in the nation.
The study was found to be more effective than BA.1. “an increased susceptibility for both unvaccinated, fully vaccinated and booster-vaccinated individuals in BA.2 households.”It also indicated that “the pattern of increased transmissibility was not for fully-vaccinated and booster-vaccinated primary cases.”
Translation: No matter what vaccination status, everyone is more at risk of contracting BA.2 from another person infected in their home. The study found that people who have been fully vaccinated or have had their immunity increased were less likely than those with lower levels of vaccination to infect other members of the household.
According to Ghebreyesus, the study supports the claim that, as Ghebreyesus stated Monday, “Variants of SARS-CoV-2 may continue to escape neutralizing antibodies induced by vaccines against prior variants.”
WHO officials made it clear this week that a comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 vaccine should be developed. This would provide protection against all variants.
“The reservoir of beta coronaviruses is large,”According to 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.”