Here's the New Variant We've Been Expecting to Possibly Renew our Misery

 

For previous waves, the pattern has been that just as a wave crests and starts dissipating, a new variant comes along to take up the slack. It happened with beta, delta, omicron and sons of omicron. 

I foolishly thought this time might be different, because the current BA.4/5 wave is bottoming out. To date I have not heard about any new variants coming along that would spoil the party.

Until today, that is, when I saw this article in the NY Times. They describe a new Omicron subvariant called BA.2.75.2.  As with other sons of Omicron it has tricks for avoiding natural and vaccine-induced immune response, including from the current bivalent booster. 

In lab tests it evaded all but one of 13 monoclonal antibodies currently in use. It also did much better at evading antibodies derived from recent Swedish blood donors than did previous Omicron sub-variants. This from a preprint study entitled "Omicron sublineage BA.2.75.2 exhibits extensive escape from neutralising antibodies." Awesome!

This subvariant was only identified last month, and is currently rare, accounting for only five-tenths of a percent of cases. It's doing a lot better than that in Arizona, accounting for around 9% of cases on September 13, according to ASU's Lim Lab.

The NYT article points out that this new variant could ultimately go nowhere. It has happened before: Back in the spring there was a variant called XE that epidemiologists said had a 10% infectiousness advantage, yet it fizzled.

But as we all know, that's more the exception than the rule. When one of these things is more infectious than the others, it can be expected to take over and cause another wave, causing an wash-rinse-repeat cycle of new variants that is seems inevitable.

What is greater than pandemic fatigue? Pandemic exhaustion?

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