WHO threatening finding: New omicron subvariant is spreading fast! Warning of what awaits us – Topky

A recent study on omicron BA.2 subvariants shows that its infectivity was 21.5 percent worldwide in the first week of February, for all new cases of omicron, the portal said. Yahoo News. Over the last thirty days, omicron has spread in 98.3 percent of the positive case samples provided for this study. The samples came from people all over the world.

BA.2 is spreading very fast, although it is not yet clear what is affected. Earlier this week, it represented most of the new cases identified in ten countries. These include Denmark, India, China, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Guam, Montenegro, Nepal, Pakistan and the Philippines. The study states that there are huge differences in the spread of countries. Southeast Asia reports the highest incidence of BA.2 (44.7 percent), while America has the lowest (one percent).

This is good news for the United States. The measures are slowly being relaxed in the country after the winter wave of omicron. Although BA.2 infectivity tripled from 1.2 to 3.6 percent between the end of January and the beginning of February, it still represents a very small proportion of new cases. In contrast, the incidence of the new omicron strain in South Africa rose from 27 to 86 percent in the first week of February, and from 2.2 to 12 percent in the United Kingdom from 17 to 31 January. Denmark has seen the number of BA.2 infections double from the last week of 2021 to mid-January 2022 from 20 to 45 percent.

BA.2 is a problem

Statens Serum Institut, operating under the auspices of the Dutch Ministry of Health, found at the end of January that BA.2 would probably account for almost one hundred percent of all cases by mid-February 2022. “BA.2 may have a thirty percent higher infectivity than BA.1 (the first variant of omicron). As a result, this rapid increase in BA.2 may mean that we will still have to wait for the infection rate to decrease.”

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The WHO, one of the first major institutions to publicly report fear of new strains, has set up graph showing the current thinking on strain BA.2. The deviation of the original variant is more than obvious. The reasons for the different spread rates of BA.2 between countries are not clear. “Differences in growth potential between countries may be related to differences in vaccination and contact between people due to constraints, population density, etc.,” stated in the WHO report.

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In South Africa, where the first occurrence of omicron was recorded, BA.2 is currently dominant. However, the vaccination rate of the population is only 29 percent. Wearing protective veils in public places is still mandatory there.