Yahoo is stating that Covid will be 'weirder' this go around.
The next U.S. COVID wave is coming. Why it will be 'much weirder than before.'
Andrew Romano
·West Coast Correspondent
Thu, October 13, 2022 at 4:00 PM
Unless you’re a real-life virologist — or unless you enjoy playing one on Twitter — it has become pretty much impossible to keep up with all of the latest coronavirus variants.
First they were named after Greek letters, like Omicron. Easy enough. Then came a few short, Star Wars-esque alphanumerics, like BA.5. Fine.
But in recent weeks, COVID trackers have suddenly been subjected to a dizzying barrage of BA.4.6s and BF.7s and BA.2.75.2s and BQ.1.1s. There’s even an ominous new sublineage called XBB.
For most Americans — the bulk of whom appear to be “over” COVID anyway — that’s far too many numbers and letters to grasp.
Easier to just tune it all out, they say.
Call me when there’s another wave on the way.
Well, now there might be.
The last big variant of concern — the hypertransmissible Omicron offshoot known as BA.5 — peaked in July. Since then, reported U.S. cases have plummeted by 70%. While far too many Americans are still dying of COVID each day — nearly 400, on average — the rate has returned to pre-BA.5 lows. It’s a moment of relative calm.
But under the surface, something new — and potentially dangerous for the most vulnerable among us — has been happening: Omicron has started to “
splinter.”
As a result, we may be entering the next phase of the pandemic. Thanks to layers of immunity from vaccination and prior infection — plus lifesaving treatments such as Paxlovid — we will almost certainly never regress to the horrific era of collapsing ICUs and thousands of deaths per day.
Yet the orderly succession of individually dominant variants we’ve come to expect over the last two years — think Alpha, then Beta, then Delta, then Omicron — may also be a thing of the past.
Instead, what scientists are seeing now is a bunch of worrisome Omicron descendants arising simultaneously but independently in different corners of the globe — all with the same set of advantageous mutations that help them dodge our existing immune defenses and drive new waves of infection.
Experts call this “convergent evolution” — and right now, there’s a “fairly unprecedented amount” of it going on, according to
Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London.
“Although stuff started off in different places — some BA.2, some BA.5 — everything’s going back in the same direction,” Peacock recently
told Stat. “They’re getting the same mutations, which implies there’s a very strong selective pressure in the environment right now, which of course is people’s immunity.”
“Clearly,” he added in
an interview with Nature, “there’s an optimal way for a variant to look going into this season.”
The problem is that what’s optimal for the coronavirus usually isn’t optimal for us.
Of all 300 post-BA.5 sublineages currently being monitored by the World Health Organization — a group that includes BA.4.6, BF.7 and BA.2.75, which have
risen as a proportion of U.S. cases in recent weeks —
experts are most concerned about two Omicron spinoffs that have barely even registered in America yet: BQ.1.1 and XBB.
“XBB and BQ.1.1 are 2 of the most important variants [to] watch right now,” Eric Topol, founder of Scripps Translational Institute,
tweeted last week.
Why? Because they’re “escape” variants. While earlier sublineages that were jockeying for post-BA.5 supremacy in the U.S. had a few advantageous mutations, XBB, B.Q.1.1 and their ilk — including BN.1 and BA.2.75.2 — now boast
at least six changes in just the right places on the virus’s spike protein (leading some researchers to refer to them as the “pentagon” or “hexagon” variants). As a consequence, they now rank as
the "most antibody-evasive” strains ever tested, according to Yunlong Richard Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing.
This is troubling for two reasons. The first is that the most vulnerable among us — the immunocompromised and the elderly — tend not to produce as strong or as lasting an antibody response after infection or vaccination. Monoclonal antibody treatments have helped fill the gap and shield them from severe illness.
But many of these treatments
were abandoned after prior variants rendered them useless — and now lab experiments have shown that the remaining antibody therapies (
bebtelovimab and Evusheld)
don’t work against
XBB and B.Q.1.1. (Last week, the Food and Drug Administration
warned that Evusheld can’t neutralize the latest variants, meaning
immunocompromised people may no longer be able to take it for pre-exposure protection.) Once the new escape variants take off, people at high risk for severe COVID are likely to be even more vulnerable than before (though not completely vulnerable as vaccination and prior infection still offer some defense against serious illness).
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Link:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-next...ll-be-much-weirder-than-before-200044795.html