The omicron offshoot’s ability to easily infect cells may be helping it spread rapidly in places
The omicron variant’s family tree has grown substantially over the last year. The brood now encompasses a subvariant soup with alphanumeric names such as BA.2, BA.5 and BF.7. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that two versions — BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 — caused just over half of new infections in the United States during the week ending January 7.
Science News spoke with infectious diseases specialist Peter Chin-Hong of the University of California, San Francisco about the latest coronavirus variant to make headlines. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Chin-Hong: There are lots of variants that get produced all the time. It’s a normal thing for the virus as the virus makes more copies of itself. It’s not exactly precise or accurate, so it makes errors, [which are the variants].
You can have somebody who got infected two or three times plus they got vaccinated and boosted. That’s going to be somebody who’s going to be really, really well protected against getting seriously ill. Maybe they might get a cold. Maybe they wouldn’t even know they had an infection versus somebody who didn’t get vaccinated and never got exposed and they’re older. It might as well be March of 2020 for them.
[Drugs such as] Paxlovid and remdesivir work independent of the spike protein [the part of the virus targeted by vaccines but where many of the defense-evading mutations are ]. So it doesn’t matter what invisibility cloak the variant has. They’re going to work because they work on shutting down the virus factory, which is one of the early steps, before the spike protein gets made.
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