YES, the fear of Covid-19 has somewhat diminished, proof that more people are now going out to work, to travel to be with relatives in the province or for that much-needed vacation, and even kids are going back to a full face-to-face class setup, at least in the public schools and in some private ones.
Though with a decreased impact, there is no denying that Covid-19 is still in our midst, and there are two Omicron subvariants—the XBB and the BQ.1.1, a descendant of the BA.5 subvariant of Omicron—that emerged to be the most dominant mutations just yet.
Based on the forecasts of Dr. Franco Felizarta, Infectious Disease Specialist of the University of the Philippines Medical Alumni Society of America (UPMASA), it looks like these two latest subvariants of Omicron would be the next dominant ones.
Dr. Felizarta said that although BA.4 is still the dominant Omicron subvariant in the US from 85 percent to 50 percent, BQ.1.1 is seen to be having an increasing trend there and Europe. The XBB, on the other hand, is the dominant strain in Asia like in Singapore, India and Bangladesh, which is almost at 100 percent,
“The bad news is that there’s more growth advantage with the new Omicron subvariants. But the good news here is that we can now predict the Omicron subvariant that will happen in the future so we’re not having any different variants now but only subvariants of the original Omicron variant,” says Dr. Felizarta during the recent Stop C.O.V.I.D Deaths webinar titled “Bago na Naman? XBB and BQ.1.1 Alamin!” that was organized by the University of the Philippines, the UP Manila NIH National Telehealth Center and in cooperation with UP Philippine General Hospital (PGH).
He noted that the BQ.1.1 will become the dominant virus by January 2023, and now there’s talk about the need to use the “bivalent” booster vaccines, which the US Food and Drug Administration says is a combination of a component of the original virus and that of the Omicron variant, which the agency also called an “updated” Covid-19 booster dose. However, Dr. Felizarta reiterated that more studies based on the live virus are needed just to confirm that the bivalent booster is superior to the older booster.
For her part, Dr. Anna Lisa Ong-Lim, a member of the Department of Health’s (DOH) Technical Advisory Group on Pediatric Infectious Diseases, said they are reviewing the current situation locally and thinking about how the protection of vaccines can still be harnessed to continue protecting Filipinos.
The DOH reported that the total number of Covid-19 cases in the country has already exceeded four million cases since tracking started two years ago. The good news, she said, is that daily numbers have really significantly decreased since the last surge early this year. “There has been no upsurge since the middle of this year which we are attributing to Omicron as well as to its subvariant mutations.”
Dr. Ong-Lim also noted that the increase in cases has not been paralleled by an increase in the number of deaths. Upon assessment, there’s no evidence for more severe illness nor more severe clinical manifestations compared to the original Omicron variant.
She likewise noted that the Philippine Genome Center in Quezon City, plus another one in the Visayas and one already in Mindanao are capable of doing their sequencing runs and the data is completed quickly. During the most recent sequencing run from October 15 to 17, a total of 61 XBB variant cases were reported, 60 coming from Western Visayas and one from the Davao region. As of October 18, eight cases were tagged as active, while 50 were reported to have recovered, while three cases’ outcomes are still being verified.
Are the vaccines still effective?
She said they want to keep an eye on the variants because the goal is to assess whether Filipinos can still be adequately protected with the current measures, including vaccines, and find out whether the current vaccines are still effective.
Dr. Ong-Lim emphasized still that if one received only two doses, it may not be enough protection against symptomatic infection, which means one can still contract Covid-19 but there will be no severe outcomes. But if one is boosted, one is not only protected against severe disease but there is also added protection against symptomatic infection.
“So, this is really the reason why we keep encouraging people to be boosted. You get not just an improvement in your protection against severe disease but also improved protection against getting symptomatic infections if the boosters used are the ones with the original sequence, or those that are currently being used today,” she said.
But do we still need to wait for the bivalent vaccines before we get booster shots, she asked. The answer to this, according to Dr. Ong-Lim, is to get vaccination soonest because the protection one gets now is essential. “If there are bivalent boosters available, that is well and good but we don’t need to wait for them to arrive and provide the protection that we will get from the third and fourth doses.”
She also repeated that their recommendations for multiple layers of protection such as physical distancing, hand hygiene, ventilation, vaccination will not change. “We really want to make sure that this message comes across. We want all of these layers in place and we also want to draw attention to the fact that we are still sorely lacking in the booster coverage and we need to work on this very, very urgently,” Dr. Ong-Lim concluded.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes