“The world has never been so close to the end of the pandemic.” With these words, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that the pandemic is coming to an end after registering the lowest death toll since the beginning of the health alert.
However, you should not let your guard down.
To stop efforts now “is to risk more variants of COVID-19, more deaths, and greater uncertainty.”
And Adhanom Ghebreyesus was not wrong: the virus continues to mutate and in recent days a new variant has emerged that has aroused the concern of epidemiologists.
Is about BA.4.6, a sub-variant of which is slowly gaining ground in the United States. And also in the United Kingdom, as the country’s health authorities have warned in a statement. Currently, it represents 9% of sequenced cases.
As explained manal mohammedProfessor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Westminster (London), in The Conversation, BA.4.6 is a recombinant variant. This happens when two variants of the same virus, in this case SARS-CoV-2, infect the same person at the same time.
Coronavirus data in Spain
8,320 new cases have been registered, so the incidence in the last 14 days in people over 60 years of age stands at 129.44 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
Only in the last week there have been 55 deaths. The rate of beds occupied by COVID patients is 2.09%, and in the ICUs it is 1.84%, slightly higher than the last report.
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And although everything indicates that BA.4.6 is similar to its little sister, BA.4, this new variant “carries a mutation in the Spike protein, R346T, which helps immune evasion. Which means that helps the virus escape from antibodies acquired by vaccination and/or previous infection”, says the specialist.
BA.4.6: Is it more contagious? More serious?
It is a question that must be answered with caution. But for the moment, as Manal Mohammed specifies, everything seems to indicate that BA.4.6 would cause a less severe disease, as occurs with infections by the omicron variant.
However, “we know that omicron subvariants tend to be more transmissible than earlier variants. And BA.4.6 seems to evade the immune response more than BA.5, the currently dominant variant” in most countries of the world.
And it is that, according to the report of the , BA.4.6 replicates rapidly in the early stages of the infection and has a higher contagion rate than BA.5.
And most worrying: people who have received the three doses of the Pfizer vaccine produce fewer antibodies to deal with this new variant.
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“This is concerning because it suggests that COVID vaccines might be less effective against BA.4.6. However, BA.4.6’s ability to evade immunity can be addressed to some extent by new bivalent boosters (protecting against the parent strain and its variants), which specifically target omicron, along with the parent strain of SARS-CoV-2”.
What are the current symptoms of COVID-19?
A study by the French Public Health indicates that the most frequent symptoms of patients infected with BA.4 and BA.5, and that they probably closely resemble those of the BA.4.6 variant. are:
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Fatigue.
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Cough.
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Fever.
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Headache.
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Runny nose.
But are not the only ones. Because now nausea, vomiting and diarrhea are also common.
Fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine
The vaccination campaign for the fourth dose against the coronavirus will begin next Monday, September 26. The second dose of memory will start with those over 80 years of age and the most vulnerable people. The Ministry of Health has 44 million doses, of which 16 will be administered during this month of September.
90.8% of the population over 5 years old has at least one dose of the vaccine. A percentage that is reduced to 89.4% if we talk about a complete guideline. But the figures are lower in memory doses, since only 54.7% of the population has all three doses.
The duration of the symptoms, highlights the organism, has increased. From four days on average for BA.1 to seven for BA.4 and BA.5. There is also a greater probability of suffering loss of smell and taste, very characteristic symptoms of SARS-CoV-2.