The World Health Organization on Tuesday confirmed that the BA.2 variant of the Omicron Coronavirus strain is not more severe than the original. But can the sub-variant, dubbed as stealth Omicron, cause another Covid surge in India?
A task force clarified that even though BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1, it is unlikely to cause another surge. "It will not cause another surge. BA.2 is not capable of infecting people who had BA.1. It's not a new virus or strain. BA.2 is a sub-lineage of Omicron," explained Dr Rajeev Jayadevan, Co-Chairman National IMA Covid Task Force, was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.
"BA.2 is a little bit more transmissible than BA.1. For the last two years, it has constantly evolved to increase its fitness, which is its ability to infect more people and to leap past natural immunity and vaccinated immunity," he added.
On the possibility of Omicron BA.2 causing another surge, Dr Suneela Garg, who is also a member of Lancet Commission, said that it cannot infect those who have previously had BA.1 sub-variant of Covid-19. "In India, most people have come in contact with BA.1, so infection will be mild. It will not cause a wave like what is going around. However, while the number of cases are declining, we need to be more vigilant," she added.
The Omicron BA.2 is spreading faster in countries like Denmark, the Philippines, and South Africa. Preliminary research reveals that the BA.2 sub-variant can overcome immunity from vaccination and can also dodge the immunity of the body.
The WHO said in a statement that initial data suggests the new BA.2 variant "appears inherently more transmissible than BA.1," and that further studies are ongoing to discover why this is the case. "However the global circulation of all variants is reportedly declining," it added.
What symptoms does the sub-variant cause?
Experts suggest that Omicron patients are reporting a wide range of symptoms owing to vaccination status and the immunity condition. Studies in the UK have revealed people infected with the sub-variant show gut-related symptoms.
"The Omicron BA.2 is more transmissible than the previously identified BA.1 sub-variant. It can cause mild symptoms," Dr Suneela Garg told IANS.
BA.2 may cause severe disease
Lab studies, recently posted on the preprint repository BioRxiv, show that the BA.2 sub-variant may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older Coronavirus variants. A Japanese team led by researchers from the University of Tokyo found that similar to BA.1, BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron appears to largely escape the immunity induced by Covid-19 vaccines.
BA.2 has started outcompeting BA.1, suggesting that it is more transmissible than the original Omicron, the researchers said. "Although BA.2 is considered as an Omicron variant, its genomic sequence is heavily different from BA.1, which suggests that the virological characteristics of BA.2 is different from that of BA.1," the authors noted.
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(With agency inputs)