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New Omicron subvariants now dominate the US, raising fears of a winter boom
Two new omicron subvariants have become dominant in the United States, according to estimates released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, raising fears that they could lead to another surge in COVID-19 infections.
The subtypes, called Bq.1 and Bq.1.1, have so far been the most efficient at evading vaccination and immunity from past infection, and have been circulating in the U.S. since the summer. have been overtaken by the dominant Ba.5 omicron subvariant.
University of Massachusetts Dr. "It's a little familiar," says Jeremy Luban, who has been tracking the variant since the pandemic began.
“This time last year we were optimistic. We were coming out of delta wave, and it was steadily decreasing, and we went into Thanksgiving to wake up Omicron. So this kind of déjà vu feeling from last year is," says Laban.
The BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 have become increasingly popular in the US in recent weeks. On Friday, they officially surpassed BA.5, which accounts for an estimated 44% of all new infections nationwide and nearly 60% in some parts of the country, such as New York and New Jersey, according to CDC estimates. . BA.5 now accounts for an estimated 30% of all new infections nationwide.
Recent laboratory studies indicate that new mutations in the virus's spike proteins make BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 seven times more "immune-inhibitory" than BA.5.
But even if new subvariants rise this winter, most experts agree that any spurt in infections will not be as hard as the pandemic's first two winter surges.
White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told NPR, "We are hoping that the amount of immunity that has been induced by either prior infection or vaccination" will protect most people from becoming seriously ill or dying.
That said, a new study suggests that being reinfected with the virus may still pose significant risks, for both short-term and long-term complications, including increased risk of hospitalization, prolonged COVID symptoms and Even death is involved.
"The risk of reinfection is certainly not small," says Ziad Al-Ali, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and author of the new study. "So now people going into the winter boom should do their best to try to prevent getting reinfected."
"You're basically playing Russian roulette all over again," he says. "You can dodge the bullet next time, but it may not."
Because the new dominant forms appear to be highly immune-aggressive, many people may become reinfected.
"The bad news is that it is likely that people who have been vaccinated and/or infected will still be infected with these new subvariants," said Dr. Daniel Barouch, who is studying the new strains.
New strains are becoming more dominant as winter approaches and people travel and gather for the holidays, factors that had already raised fears about another surge in winter.
Harvard Th. "The U.S. is going to see a spike in COVID infections in the winter," predicted William Hanes, a U.S. epidemiologist. Chan School of Public Health. "And I think BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 have the potential to be very important players if nothing else changes."
The key question is the scale of any winter surge that emerges.
"The question is whether this increase is going to be nationwide and whether the size of the increase and the surge will be something similar to what we experienced with Delta and Omicron, or much smaller," says Samuel Scarpino, vice president of Pathogen Surveillance. Rockefeller Foundation.
"I think it's very relatable," he says.
Infections and even hospitalizations have begun to rise in some parts of the country.
One promising sign is that recent surges in other countries suggest that if the subvariant could become a new U.S. If ripple is involved, any increase may be short-lived. For example, while France experienced a surge in the addition of the new subvariants, the increase in cases quickly decelerated.
Still, experts are urging more people to get an updated booster, which targets omicron for the first time.
"Hopefully, more people will go and get their updated vaccine -- the bivalent vaccine," Fauci says. "It would undercut a real boom and in the worst case we would get a major boom versus a blip."
While some preliminary studies have questioned whether the new boosters are better than the original vaccine at protecting against Omicron, others have suggested that they may be. Vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and BioNTech recently issued a statement saying that their new booster provokes higher levels of antibodies that can neutralize the BA.5 omicron subvariant than the original vaccine.
Another concern is that these new subvariants will eventually render useless monoclonal antibody drugs, including the one that people with compromised immune systems use to protect themselves.
"The winter is going to be especially worrisome for people who are immunocompromised," says Harvard's Hanez.
