The Associated Press reported on Saturday that in the latest battle of the coronavirus mutants, an extra-contagious version of Omicron has taken over the world. The report said the BA.2 variant is now dominant in at least 68 countries, including the United States. The BA.2 has lots of mutations. It’s been dubbed “stealth Omicron” because it lacks a genetic quirk of the original Omicron that allowed health officials to rapidly differentiate it from the Delta variant.
Besides being more contagious, it’s spreading at a time when governments are relaxing restrictions designed to control Covid-19. Also, people are taking off their masks and getting back to activities such as traveling, eating indoors at restaurants and attending crowded events.
The World Health Organization says the BA.2 variant makes up about 94 percent of sequenced Omicron cases submitted to an international coronavirus database in the most recent week. And the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it was responsible for 72 percent of new US infections last week. One reason the BA.2 has gained ground, scientists say, is that it’s about 30 percent more contagious than the original Omicron variant.
China in March started banning citizens from leaving a Covid-hit Northeastern province and mobilized military reservists as the fast-spreading stealth Omicron variant BA.2 was starting to fuel the country’s biggest outbreak since the start of the pandemic two years ago. In mid-March, the National Health Commission reported 1,337 locally transmitted cases in one day, including 895 in the industrial province of Jilin. A government notice said that police permission would be required for people to leave the area or travel from one city to another.
From Bloomberg: “China’s largest Covid outbreak in two years continues to spread despite an extended lockdown of Shanghai’s 25 million people, weighing on a fragile economy and straining global supply chains. There were 26,087 new daily infections reported in the Chinese financial hub on Sunday, an all-time high. Residents have been locked down for weeks now, with frustration building among the population as they struggle to get access to food and medical care.”
The good news is that no new Covid variants have been detected in the Philippines, according to Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire. “The latest sequencing result was last March wherein we can say that the Omicron variant is almost 80 percent of the samples detected in the latest genome sequencing run. Aside from that, we have not seen any variant or sublineages of this Omicron variant,” Vergeire said (Read, “DOH: No Covid recombinant variants detected in PHL, in the BusinessMirror, April 8, 2022).
The Department of Health on Friday said the number of new Covid-19 cases is on a plateau in the National Capital Region and all other regions of the country. “When we say it’s plateauing, it means infections stopped, it has plateaued, it stopped from decreasing or it was sustained at that level. As we continue to see a plateau in new Covid cases, we highly encourage the public to complete their primary vaccine series and get booster doses to better protect the whole community,” Vergeire said. (Read, “DOH: Covid-19 cases nationwide are ‘plateauing,’” in the BusinessMirror, April 8, 2022).
Although hospitalizations and deaths are trending down in the country, the advice from experts remains the same: Take precautions to avoid getting Covid. The virus, which killed more than six million people in the world, is still circulating and evolving into more contagious variants. Let’s continue using our face masks, especially in public places.