This is bad news for many of us.
with the coronavirus at least once, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , and a majority of these infections were caused by the Omicron variant, which started spreading in the U.S. last winter. This variant caused a record number of COVID cases in the country from November through January before infections started steadily falling in February.New cases are no longer declining, however.
And while BA.2 is still the dominant variant circulating, cases of BA.2.12.1 are increasing significantly. The CDC is reporting that this subvariant is now responsible for in the country—a substantial jump up from 22 percent just two weeks ago. This is a large concern for virus experts, who say that BA.2.12.1 is even more transmissible than Omicron or BA.2.with an estimated three-fold increase in its effective reproduction number compared with Delta,", MD, a public health expert and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, explained in a May 4 blog post."That evolution has proceeded full steam with BA.
This could also spell trouble for one of the main vaccine development strategies currently underway in the U.S."The Omicron-specific vaccines that use the BA.1 spike structure, which are in clinical trials and due to read out in the next couple of months, may not fulfill their promise with a variant that carries such immune escape properties," Topol explained in his blog post.
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