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This New COVID Variant Is Shaping Up to Be a Déjà Vu Nightmare - Yahoo News

This New COVID Variant Is Shaping Up to Be a Déjà Vu Nightmare - Yahoo News

This New COVID Variant Is Shaping Up to Be a Déjà Vu Nightmare - Yahoo News
Aug 15, 2022 1 min, 51 secs

The world has built up a lot of immunity in the nine months since the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus became dominant, driving a record wave of infections.

That immunity from vaccines and past infection is helping to keep down hospitalizations and deaths even as Omicron’s offspring—a succession of subvariants—have become dominant, one after the other.

A new subvariant, BA.4.6, is beginning to outcompete its predecessor, BA.5.

If BA.4.6 becomes dominant, it could reverse the encouraging trend we’ve seen in most countries in recent weeks toward fewer infections, fewer hospitalizations, fewer deaths.

It’s the seventh major subvariant of Omicron, which first appeared in Africa back in November.

“There’s a huge selective pressure for immune escape, especially now that the great majority of the population has some degree of immunity, from immunization, infection or both,” Keith Jerome, a University of Washington virologist, told The Daily Beast.

It’s not totally clear how the virus came up with the change.

It’s possible, in other words, that BA.4.6 is a “recombinant” subvariant that picked up its most advantageous quality from one of its predecessors.

With R346T, the virus has a better chance of slipping right past our immune systems and causing an infection.

Greater immune escape means more and worse infections.

We’ve been lucky with Omicron in the sense that, even as the variant and its subvariants have driven back-to-back-to-back waves in cases since November, hospitalizations and deaths haven’t risen in proportion.

If there’s good news in BA.4.6’s rise, it’s that for all its worrying mutations it’s still an Omicron sublineage—and still has a lot of mutations in common with BA.5, BA.4, BA.2 and BA.1.

“The trick for the virus is to find a way to escape immunity while still maintaining the ability to infect new people efficiently,” Jerome explained.

A variant or subvariant with near-total immune escape could drag us back to the most terrifying days of the early pandemic, when almost no one had immunity—or any way of developing immunity without surviving a very dangerous infection.

But BA.4.6 with its R346T mutation and potential for immune escape might be a preview of that worst-case scenario.

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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