Russia (bbabo.net), - A new subspecies of the strain "omicron" VA-2, also known as "stealth-omicron", has already been found in 57 countries. This is stated in the weekly report of the World Health Organization (WHO) with reference to the international database of virus genomes GISAID.
"Sequences designated BA-2 have been submitted to GISAID to date from 57 countries, with the weekly proportion of BA-2 compared to other omicron sequences increasing by more than 50% in several countries over the past six weeks," - indicated in the report, which quotes RIA Novosti.
According to WHO, Omicron accounted for over 93% of all coronavirus samples uploaded to the GISAID database in January. Previously, scientists at the Danish Serum Institute found that the BA-2 subspecies is significantly more contagious than the original BA-1 strain. This subspecies was discovered earlier this year and quickly became the dominant variant in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries.
Earlier, infectious disease specialist, chief physician of the clinical diagnostic laboratory of Invitro-Sibir LLC, Andrey Pozdnyakov, said that this substrain did not cause an increase in childhood morbidity and hospitalization in general. True, such a favorable development of the situation, according to the expert, may be influenced by the high level of vaccination in the Scandinavian countries. The symptoms of BA-1 are similar to those of previous strains: high fever, persistent cough, and loss of smell. At the same time, there is no increase in the number of hospitalizations, the expert noted.
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