ReportWire

Tag: new variant

  • How Bad Could BA.2.86 Get?

    How Bad Could BA.2.86 Get?

    [ad_1]

    Since Omicron swept across the globe in 2021, the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has moved at a slower and more predictable pace. New variants of interest have come and gone, but none have matched Omicron’s 30-odd mutations or its ferocious growth. Then, about two weeks ago, a variant descended from BA.2 popped up with 34 mutations in its spike protein—a leap in viral evolution that sure looked a lot like Omicron. The question became: Could it also spread as quickly and as widely as Omicron?

    This new variant, dubbed BA.2.86, has now been detected in at least 15 cases across six countries, including Israel, Denmark, South Africa, and the United States. This is a trickle of new cases, not a flood, which is somewhat reassuring. But with COVID surveillance no longer a priority, the world’s labs are also sequencing about 1 percent of what they were two years ago, says Thomas Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute. The less surveillance scientists are doing, the more places a variant could spread out of sight, and the longer it will take to understand BA.2.86’s potential.

    Peacock told me that he will be closely tracking the data from Denmark in the next week or two. The country still has relatively robust SARS-CoV-2 sequencing, and because it has already detected BA.2.86, we can now watch the numbers rise—or not—in real time. Until the future of BA.2.86 becomes clear, three scenarios are still possible.

    The worst but also least likely scenario is another Omicron-like surge around the world. BA.2.86 just doesn’t seem to be growing as explosively. “If it had been very fast, we probably would have known by now,” Peacock said, noting that, in contrast, Omicron’s rapid growth took just three or four days to become obvious.

    Scientists aren’t totally willing to go on record ruling out Omicron redux yet, if only because patchy viral surveillance means no one has a complete global picture. Back in 2021, South Africa noticed that Omicron was driving a big COVID wave, which allowed its scientists to warn the rest of the world. But if BA.2.86 is now causing a wave in a region that isn’t sequencing viruses or even testing very much, no one would know.

    Even in this scenario, though, our collective immunity will be a buffer against the virus. BA.2.86 looks on paper to have Omicron-like abilities to cause reinfection, according to a preliminary analysis of its mutations by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Washington, but he adds that there’s a big difference between 2021 and now. “At the time of the Omicron wave, there were still a lot of people out there that had never been either vaccinated or infected with SARS-CoV-2, and those people were sort of especially easy targets,” he told me. “Now the vast, vast majority of people in the world have either been infected or vaccinated with SARS-CoV-2—or are often both infected and vaccinated multiple times. So that means I think any variant is going to have a very hard time spreading as well as Omicron.”

    A second and more likely possibility is that BA.2.86 ends up like the other post-Omicron variants: transmissible enough to edge out a previous variant, but not transmissible enough to cause a big new surge. Since the original Omicron variant, or BA.1, took over, the U.S. has successively cycled through BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.5, BQ.1, XBB.1.5—and if these jumbles of numbers and letters seem only faintly familiar, it’s because they never reached the same levels of notoriety as the original. Vaccine makers track them to keep COVID shots up to date, but the World Health Organization hasn’t deemed any worthy of a new Greek letter.

    If BA.2.86 continues to circulate, though, it could pick up mutations that give it new advantages. In fact, XBB.1.5, which rose to dominance earlier this year, leveled up this way. When XBB.1.5’s predecessor was first identified in Singapore, Peacock said, it wasn’t a very successful variant: Its spike protein bound weakly to receptors in human cells. Then it acquired an additional mutation in its spike protein that compensated for the loss of binding, and it turned into the later-dominant XBB.1.5. Descendents of BA.2.86 could eventually become more transmissible than the variant looks right now.

    A third scenario is that BA.2.86 just fizzles out and goes away. Scientists now believe that highly mutated variants such as BA.2.86 are probably products of chronic infections in immunocompromised patients. In these infections, the virus remains in the body for a long time, trying out new ways to evade the immune system. It might end up with mutations that make its spike protein less recognizable to antibodies, but those same mutations could also render the spike protein less functional and therefore the virus less good at transmitting from person to person.

    “Variants like that have been identified over the last few years,” Bloom said. “Often there’s one sample found, and that’s it. Or multiple samples all found in the same place.” BA.2.86 is transmissible enough to be found multiple times in multiple places, but whether it can overtake existing variants is unclear. To do so, BA.2.86 needs to escape antibodies while also preserving its inherent transmissibility. Otherwise, Bloom said, cases might crop up here and there, but the variant never really takes off. In other words, the BA.2.86 situation basically stays where it is right now.

    The next few weeks will reveal which of these futures we’re living in. If the number of BA.2.86 cases starts to go up, in a way that requires more attention, we’ll know soon. But each week that the variant’s spread does not jump dramatically, the less likely BA.2.86 is to end up a variant of actual concern.

    [ad_2]

    Sarah Zhang

    Source link

  • The Case for Kraken

    The Case for Kraken

    [ad_1]

    A new subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly taking over in the U.S.—the most transmissible that has ever been detected. It’s called XBB.1.5, in reference to its status as a hybrid of two prior strains of Omicron, BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. It’s also called “Kraken.”

    Not by everyone, though. The nickname Kraken was ginned up by an informal group of scientists on Twitter and has caught on at some—but only some—major news outlets. As one evolutionary virologist told The Atlantic earlier this week, the name—at first glance, a reference to a folkloric sea monster—“seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people” and serves no substantive purpose for communicating science.

    Yes, Kraken is klickbait. It’s arbitrary, unofficial, and untethered to specific facts of evolution or epidemiology—a desperate play to get attention. And mazel tov for that. We should all rejoice at this stupid name’s arrival. Long live the Kraken! May XBB.1.5 sink into the sea.

    Since Omicron spread around the world in the fall of 2021, we’ve been subject to a stultifying slew of jargon from the health authorities: Miniature waves of new infections keep lapping at our shores, while the names of the Omicron subvariants that produce them slop together in a cryptic muck: XBB.1.5 has overtaken BA.5 in recent weeks, and also BF.7, as well as BQ.1 and BQ.1.1; in China, BA.5.2 is quickly spreading too. One might ask, without a shred of undue panic, how worried we should be—but the naming scheme itself precludes an answer. You don’t even need to ask, it says. You’ll never fully understand.

    This isn’t subtext; it’s explicit. A spokesperson for the World Health Organization told my colleague Jacob Stern that people should be grateful for the arcane pronouncements of our leading international consortia. “The public doesn’t need to distinguish between these Omicron subvariants in order to better understand their risk or the measures they need to take to protect themselves,” he said. “If there is a new variant that requires public communication and discourse, it would be designated a new variant of concern and assigned a new label.” In other words: None of what we’re seeing now is bad enough to merit much attention. You don’t need to make any brand-new precautions, so we don’t need to talk about it.

    The public may not need to draw distinctions. But do those distinctions really need to be obscured? A different set of names, one that isn’t precision-engineered to harpoon people’s interest, wouldn’t have to fool us into feeling false alarm. It’s not as though our habit of assigning common names to storms leads to widespread panic starting every summer. When Hurricane Earl appeared last September, no one rushed into a bunker just because they knew what it was called. Then Ian came a few weeks later, and millions evacuated.

    Granted, Kraken sounds a bit more ominous than Earl. (Of all the labels that could be given to the latest version of a deadly virus, it’s not the best.) But the name is more befuddling than terrifying: a nitwitted reference, somehow, to ferocity, absurdity, and conspiratorial delusion all at once. Even so, a silly name still has the virtue of being a name, while a string of numbers and letters is just an entry in a database. Kraken doesn’t care if you’re afraid of COVID, and it doesn’t mind if you’re indifferent. It only wishes to be understood.

    Isn’t that important? A proper name eases conversation (wherever that might lead), and makes it possible to talk about what matters (and what doesn’t). Just try telling the public that Hurricane Earl will be no big deal but Ian is a mortal threat, if instead of “Earl” and “Ian” you had to say “BA.2.12.1” and “B.1.1.529.” The committee that names our storms is chasing clouds instead of clout; it knows that branding efforts make it easier for everyone to stay informed. We might have done the same for SARS-CoV-2, and handed out simple, easy-to-remember names for all the leading Omicron subvariants. (Through 2021, we used Greek letters to describe each major variant.) If Kraken seems alarmist now, that’s because we’re living in a different, dumber timeline, where public legibility has been forbidden. Why give this subvariant a name, the global health officials ask, when it isn’t really that much worse than any other? But that’s a problem of their own creation. If Kraken seems too gaudy, that’s because every other recent name has been too drab.

    Having useful, catchy names doesn’t mean avoiding all abstraction. Florida residents were glad to know, last fall, which hurricanes were Category 2 and which were Category 5; and it may be just as useful to remind yourself that Kraken is not now, of its own accord, a “variant of concern,” let alone a “variant of high consequence.” Our trust in those distinctions is a product of their formality: A special group of experts has decided which public threats are the most important. The Kraken name, if it continues to spread, could undermine this useful sense of deference—and leave us in an awkward free-for-all where anyone could give a name to any variant at any time.

    For the moment, though, our only recourse is to the numbing nomenclature that is now in place, and to the creaking bureaucracy that delivers it. Any other name for XBB.1.5—any better one than Kraken—would have to come from the WHO, an organization that recently spent five months rebranding monkeypox as “mpox” and that has warned that disease names like “paralytic shellfish poisoning” are unduly stigmatizing to shellfish. Kraken has the crucial benefit of being right in front of us. It’s a stupid name, but it’s a name—and names are good.

    [ad_2]

    Daniel Engber

    Source link