Top U.S. health officials warned Tuesday that an expected surge in COVID-19 cases driven by the highly transmissible Omicron subvariant BA.5 has arrived, but that the country has the tools to deal with it.
cases driven by the highly transmissible Omicron subvariant BA.5 has arrived, but stressed that the country has the tools — like vaccines and antiviral treatments — to prevent people from getting seriously ill.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and chief medical adviser to President Biden, said that BA.5 “substantially evades neutralizing antibodies” induced in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected.But Fauci said that the current vaccines are “still effective at preventing severe COVID-19 outcomes” such as hospitalization and death — and urged Americans to stay up to date with their COVID shots.
At first, COVID-19 seemed like a one-and-done infection. Not anymore. The primary culprit is BA.5, which has a bevy of mutations that make it better than any of its predecessors at dodging whatever immune defenses we’ve built up over two and a half years of infection and vaccination, then infecting us anyway.BA.5 isn’t the first evasive variant we’ve encountered; both Delta and the earlier versions of Omicron also sidestepped first-generation antibodies. But BA.
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