But suddenly, many people who had recovered from Covid-19 as recently as March or April found themselves exhausted, coughing and staring at two red lines at a rapid test. How could this happen again – and so soon?
The culprit this time is yet another Omicron branch, BA.5. Its spike protein has three key mutations that make it better at infecting our cells and more efficient at bypassing our immune defenses.
Lab studies of antibodies from the blood of people who have been vaccinated or who have recently recovered from COVID-19 infections have looked at how well they stand up to BA.5, and that this subvariant may outnumber them. Therefore, people who have recently had covid in the form of winter or spring, they may be vulnerable to the virus again.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Valensky said at Tuesday’s White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing, “We do not know the clinical severity of ba.4 and ba.5 compared to our other Omicron subvariants. ” “But we know it’s more transmissible and more immune-concealing. People with prior infection, even with BA.1 and BA.2, are still at risk for BA.4 or BA.5.” Huh.”
a ‘full-on’ wave
The result is that we are getting sick in large numbers. As Americans switch to more rapid home tests, official case counts – currently there are about 110,000 new infections a day – represent only a fraction of the true disease burden.
“We estimate that 7 are unreported for every reported case,” Ali Moqdad, professor of health metrics science at the Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, wrote in an email.
Other experts believe the wave could be 10 times greater than what is being reported now.
“We’re probably seeing about a million new cases a day,” Dr. Peter Hotez said on CNN on Monday. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, said, “It’s a full-on BA.5 wave that we’re experiencing this summer. It’s actually looking worse in the southern states, like in 2020, in 2021.” ” Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
This places us in the range of cases reported during the first omicron wave in January. Remember when it seemed like everyone everywhere got sick at the same time? This is the situation again in the United States.
This may not seem like a big deal, as vaccines and better treatments have dramatically reduced the risk of death from COVID-19. Still, an average of about 300 to 350 people are dying from Covid-19 every day, enough to fill a large passenger jet.
“It’s unacceptable. It’s too much,” Dr. Ashish Jha, coordinator of the White House COVID-19 response team, said at Tuesday’s briefing.
Daily hospitalizations are also increasing in the United States. The proportion of patients requiring intensive care has increased by about 23% in the past two weeks. And other countries are also experiencing BA.5 waves.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, said, “I am concerned that cases of Covid-19 are increasing, putting further pressure on health systems and healthcare workers. I am also concerned about the increasing trend of deaths.” ” , at a news briefing on Tuesday following the agency’s decision to maintain its emergency declaration for Covid-19.
The pandemic, he said, “is nowhere.”
What’s at stake with the constant spread
There are more insidious health risks to consider. A recent preprint study that compared the health of people who had been infected with COVID-19 one or more times found that the risk of new and sometimes permanent health problems increased with each subsequent infection. suggesting that re-infections are not necessarily benign.
Although vaccination reduces the risk of getting covid in the long run, a small percentage of people develop permanent symptoms after 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 create an even more infectious version of itself. We are doing so faster than we can replace our vaccines, plunging us into the COVID-rinse-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 equipment to prevent the spread of the virus, including masking, ventilation and social distancing.
“We need to keep virus levels to the lowest possible level, and that’s our best defense. If a virus isn’t replicating and spreading very strongly, it reduces the chance of a mutation, which can cause it to gives less chance of another version being developed,” Fauci said at a news briefing.
In fact, it is already happening.
Meet BA.2.75
Even as America approaches with BA.5, various hunters around the world are closely watching another Omicron descendant, BA.2.75. It has been found in about 10 countries, including the United States, and seems to be growing rapidly in India.
According to Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, there are nine changes in the spike region of BA.2.75 that separate it from BA.2 and about 11 changes compared to BA.5.
Many of the mutations in BA.2.75 are in a region of the spike protein known to be an important locus for antibodies to stop the virus, said Ulrich Elling, a scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who works for that country. Let’s monitor coronavirus variants. ,
There is little information to proceed: it is still not known, for example, how BA.2.75 can compete against BA.5 or whether it causes more severe disease. But experts say that it has all the hallmarks of a variant that could be global.
“It’s already spread to many different countries, so we know it has some kind of staying power,” said Shishi Luo, associate director of bioinformatics and infectious disease for Helix Labs, which operates the CDC. and decodes virus samples for other customers.
Because of that, and because of changes in the region of the virus that our antibodies see to ward off it, “we know ahead of time that it will cause some trouble,” Luo said.
Based on what we know now, she expects this subvariant to drive a declining Covid-19 wave in the United States.
Meanwhile, Jha said, people should get boosters to keep their immunity as strong as possible. US health officials stressed that those who have just received a boost will still be able to get an updated shot this fall that includes the BA.4 and BA.5 strains.
Jha specifically urged Americans who are 50 and older, “If you didn’t get the vaccine this year, get one now. It could save your life,” he said.