The BA.2 lineage might prolong the Omicron wave, but won’t necessarily cause a fresh surge of COVID infections--studies.

Why does the Omicron sub-variant spread faster than the original? Nature - Early studies suggest that the BA.2 lineage might prolong the Omicron wave, but won’t necessarily cause a fresh surge of COVID infections. Callaway, Ewen nature

Why does the Omicron sub-variant spread faster than the original? Nature - Early studies suggest that the BA.2 lineage might prolong the Omicron wave, but won’t necessarily cause a fresh surge of COVID infections. Callaway, Ewen nature

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The variant, known as BA.2, has spread rapidly in countries including Denmark, the Philippines and South Africa in the past few weeks. It follows the initial spread of the BA.1 Omicron variant of the virus SARS-CoV-2, which was first identified in southern Africa in late November and quickly spread worldwide.

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A laboratory study¹ of BA.2 suggests that its rapid ascent is probably the result of it being more transmissible than BA.1. And other preliminary studies suggest that BA.2 can readily overcome immunity from vaccination and previous infection with earlier variants, although it is not much better than BA.1 at doing so.

If real-world epidemiological studies support these conclusions, scientists think that BA.2 will be unlikely to spark a second major wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths after Omicron’s initial onslaught.

“It might prolong the Omicron surge. But our data would suggest that it would not lead to a brand-new additional surge,” says Dan Barouch, an immunologist and virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the laboratory study, posted on the medRxiv preprint server on 7 February.