Do the new variants make people sicker? Will vaccines protect against new variants?
Aug 19 - The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention areSix cases in four countries have been detected since late July. Scientists are keeping an eye on the new lineage, named BA.2.86, because it has 36 mutations that distinguish it from the currently-dominant XBB.1.5 variant.
Over the past few days, public health authorities have documented one case each of BA.2.86 in the United States, the UK, and Israel, and three cases in Denmark.BA.2.86 stems from an "earlier branch" of the coronavirus, so it differs from the variant targeted by current vaccines, explained Dr. S. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist Hospital.
But many countries have drastically reduced testing of patients and their efforts to analyze the genomes of the viruses causing new COVID cases. In that situation, the trajectory of BA.2.86 "doesn't look good right now," given the speed at which new cases are being identified, said Dr. Eric Topol, a genomics expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.
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