But suddenly many people who had recovered from Covid-19 in March or April found themselves exhausted, coughing and staring at two red lines on a quick test. How could this be happening again – and so soon?
The culprit this time is yet another Omicron fork, BA.5. It has three key mutations in its spike protein that make it better at infecting our cells and more adept at slipping past our immune defenses.
Laboratory studies of antibodies from the blood of people who have been vaccinated or recovered from recent Covid-19 infections have looked at how well they withstand BA.5 and this sub-variant can outsmart them. So people who had Covid in the winter or even spring may be vulnerable to the virus again.
“We don’t know about the clinical burden of BA.4 and BA.5 compared to our other Omicron subvariants,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House Covid-19 Response Team briefing on Tuesday. “But we know it’s more transferable and more immune evasive. People with a previous infection, even with BA.1 and BA.2, are probably still at risk for BA.4 or BA.5.”
“Full” wave
The result is that we are getting sick en masse. As Americans have moved to faster testing at home, the official case count — currently hovering around 110,000 new infections a day — reflects only a fraction of the disease’s true burden.
“We estimate that for every reported case there are 7 unreported,” Ali Mokdad, a professor of health indicators at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Indicators and Evaluation, wrote in an email.
Other experts believe the wave could be up to 10 times higher than what is being reported now.
“We’re looking at probably close to a million new cases a day,” Dr. Peter Hotez said Monday on CNN. “It’s a full BA.5 wave we’re experiencing this summer. It actually looks worse in the southern states, just like 2020, just like 2021,” said Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
This puts us within the range of cases reported during the first Omicron wave, in January. Remember when it seemed like everyone everywhere was getting sick at the same time? This is the situation again in the United States.
It may not seem like a big deal because vaccines and better treatments have dramatically reduced the risk of dying from Covid-19. Still, about 300 to 350 people die on average every day from Covid-19, enough to fill a large passenger plane.
“This is unacceptable. It’s too high,” Dr. Ashish Jha, coordinator of the White House’s Covid-19 response team, said at Tuesday’s briefing.
Daily hospitalizations are also rising in the United States. The proportion of patients requiring intensive care has risen by about 23% in the past two weeks. And other countries are also experiencing BA.5 waves.
“I am concerned that Covid-19 cases continue to rise, putting further pressure on stretched health systems and health workers. I am also concerned about the rising trend in deaths,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization. , at a news briefing Tuesday following the agency’s decision to maintain its Covid-19 emergency declaration.
The pandemic, he said, “is far from over.”
What’s at stake in the continued spread
There are also more insidious health risks to be aware of. A recent preprint study that compared the health of people who had been infected one or more times with Covid-19 found that the risk of new and sometimes permanent health problems increased with each subsequent infection, suggesting that repeated infections are not necessarily benign.
Although vaccination reduces the risk of prolonged Covid, a certain percentage of people have persistent symptoms after a breakthrough infection.
This is another reason why the high number of Covid-19 cases is a big deal: because the virus is still spreading wildly, it has every opportunity to mutate to make even healthier and more contagious versions of itself . It does this faster than we can change our vaccines, leaving us stuck in the covid wash and repeat period of the pandemic.
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, urged Americans to use all available tools to stop the spread of the virus, including masking, ventilation and social distancing.
“We need to keep virus levels as low as possible and that is our best defense. If the virus is not replicating and spreading very stably, that gives it less chance to mutate, which gives it less chance to develop another variant,” Fauci said at a news briefing.
In fact, this is already happening.
Meet BA.2.75
Even as the US comes to terms with the BA.5, variant hunters around the world are keeping a close eye on another Omicron descendant, the BA.2.75. It is found in about 10 countries, including the United States, and appears to be growing rapidly in India.
BA.2.75 has nine changes in its spike region that distinguish it from BA.2 and about 11 changes compared to BA.5, according to Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London.
Several of the mutations in BA.2.75 are in a region of the spike protein, which is known to be an important site for antibodies to bind to stop the virus, said Ulrich Elling, a scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who monitors coronavirus variants for this country .
There is little information on further: it is not yet known, for example, how BA.2.75 may compete with BA.5 or whether it causes more severe disease. But experts say it has all the hallmarks of a variant that could go global.
“It’s already spread to many different countries, so we know it has some resistance,” said Shishi Luo, associate director of bioinformatics and infectious diseases for Helix Labs, which decodes viral samples for the CDC and other clients.
Because of that, and because of the changes in the region of the virus that our antibodies look for to shut it down, “we kind of know in advance that this one is going to cause some problems,” Luo said.
Based on what we know now, she expects this subvariant could cause a fall wave of Covid-19 in the United States.
In the meantime, Jha said people should get boosters that are available to them to keep their immunity as strong as possible. U.S. health officials stressed that people who are boosted now will still be able to get an updated vaccine this fall that includes the BA.4 and BA.5 strains.
Ja specifically urged Americans who are 50 and older, “if you haven’t gotten vaccinated this year, go get one now. It could save your life,” he said.
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