BA.2.86 is the most mutated version of coronavirus since omicron, raising fears about re-infection. But it’s unclear whether it’s transmissible enough to surge.
Officials say they should have a clearer understanding of the variant’s transmissibility in the coming weeks as surveillance ramps up in response to the threat.
On Aug. 12, virologists in Israel were the first to announce that BA.2.86 had been detected in a patient.soon followed. Some of the samples were collected in late July. The sporadic reports add up to evidence of international transmission, but the magnitude is unclear. In one Swiss town, roughly 2 percent of coronavirus particles sequenced in a wastewater sample taken in early August were BA.2.86 variants. That was the first sign of a variant spreading within a community.“Finding BA.2.86 in yet an additional country — now in wastewater rather than a patient — is another piece of evidence that BA.2.86 is globally widespread by now,” Tanja Stadler, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who announced the findings, wrote in an email.
Areas where BA.2.86 have been detected have not seen disproportionate increases in hospitalizations, the CDC said, suggesting it’s not more likely to cause more severe illness than other omicron subvariants.Even if variants are adept at escaping antibodies to enter cells, those antibodies are just the front lines of the immune system, which has other mechanisms to fight off the virus and keep the infection less severe.
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