A new Omicron subvariant of the COVID-19 virus has appeared in the United States, and public health officials expect it will become the dominant strain in the country in the coming weeks.
BA.2.75 appears significantly more contagious than previous variants. Still, it seems to follow the trend of other subvariants that result in milder illness compared to the Delta variant and the original COVID-19 virus.
“The important thing too with these variants to understand is that even though they’re getting more transmissible, more infectious, they’re actually getting weaker in terms of causing disease,” stated Dr. Joseph Chang, chief medical officer at Parkland Memorial Hospital, speaking with CBS 11. “Hospitalizations in my hospitals have only gone up to the 20s and if you’ll recall at the peak of Omicron, the peak of Delta, we were talking about 200-300 cases in my hospital.”
Health officials are monitoring the spread of BA.2.75 in India to gauge the scope of contagion elsewhere in the world. Since it first appeared in that country in June, it has been responsible for roughly 25% of all positive cases.
Commenting on how the dynamic could play out in the United States, Dr. Sabrina Assoumou of the Boston Medical Center stated to NBC Boston, “There’s been a different mix of infection-acquired immunity versus vaccine-acquired immunity [in India], so it’s a little hard to know how it’s going to behave here.”
Dr. Shira Doron of Tufts Medical Center added, “We cannot assume that what’s happening there will happen here, and yet we do have to prepare for surges. We are always now preparing for surges. Variants will emerge that evade immunity from the vaccine and prior infection, and we can’t ever quite know exactly what they’re going to do to our case rates until we get there.”