How do clinical outcomes in patients infected with different Omicron subvariants differ? medrxivpreprint HopkinsMedicine JohnsHopkinsSPH Omicron COVID19 coronavirus covid infection disease
By Dr. Chinta SidharthanSep 27 2022Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc. In a recent study posted to the medRxiv* preprint server, researchers compare the clinical outcomes, upper respiratory viral loads, and viral recovery of different severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 Omicron subvariants on cell cultures.
About the study The present study used the remnant lateral mid-turbinate nasal or nasopharyngeal swabs from testing symptomatic and asymptomatic patients at the Johns Hopkins Health System between December 2021 and July 2022. The SARS-CoV-2-positive clinical specimens were used for whole genome sequencing.
A 50% tissue culture infectious dose assay was used to measure the infectious virus titers in VT and VAT cells. Various statistical analyses such as Chi-square analysis, Fisher Exact test, Mann-Whitney U test, and one-way analysis of variance were used to examine the correlations between variables.
The authors believe that the variation in hospitalization rates for each subvariant could be due to factors such as increased home testing with only severe cases seeking hospital admissions, as well as seasonality with more COVID-19 cases during the colder and drier months. The waning of vaccination-induced immunity could also be responsible for the increase in hospitalizations for the most recent subvariants.
According to the authors, the difference in the recovery of infectious BA.2 and BA.5 subvariant viruses is correlated to the increased immune escape exhibited by BA.5, which contributed to the increased infectivity and rise in the number of cases during BA.5 dominance.
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