With each new variant, the anxiety starts again.
As the seventh wave of Covid-19 hits France, and more broadly Europe, because of the BA.5, a new and umpteenth sub-variant of Omicron comes to sow doubt.
First detected in India, BA.2.75, nicknamed "centaur", is now found in the Netherlands.
A first case of contamination was detected in a sample dating from June 26, the Dutch Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) announced on Wednesday.
"The Ba.2.75 variant of the coronavirus", already detected among others in India, Australia, Japan, Canada, the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, "has now been identified in the low countries", said the RIVM in a statement.
"We know little about the BA. 2.75," said the Institute, but it "also seems to be able to go around the defense built against the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus thanks to small specific changes".
Worrying changes
World Health Organization (WHO) chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said last week that BA.2.75 was first reported in India and then in a dozen other countries.
She pointed out that there are “still limited sequences” for analysis, but indicated that the subvariant appears to have some “mutations on the receptor binding domain of the spike protein (…) a key element of the virus that binds to human receptors.
“It is still too early to know if this subvariant has additional immune evasion properties or even to be more clinically severe – we do not know”, she insisted, while ensuring that the WHO is monitoring the situation.
Varying "under surveillance"
The sample in question in the low countries comes from the province of Gueldre (northwest), and was taken on June 26, 2022, said the RIVM, which will look if a source search is possible and "follows the situation closely ".
BA.2.75 was listed on July 7 by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) as a “variant under surveillance”.
Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, tweeted in late June that BA.2.75 was "worth watching" because it contains "lots of peak mutations", is a "probable second-generation variant", with "apparent rapid growth" and "wide geographical spread".
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Covid-19
epidemic
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Variant Omicron