....who still wants to hear or know about COVID? It is so old news but it is far from gone...already flaring up in India and likely to hit centre stage soon.
....this is just one of the "known knowns" risk that has yet to be considered in terms of possible ramifications for economy and markets.
....there's just more bad news than good, so for those who find all the "bad news" too confronting on this thread, please do not visit.
....time to mask up. Virologists predict new ‘centaurus’ variant will drive next virus wave Tom Burton
Jul 4, 2022 – 5.09pm
Virologists are warning that a highly contagious new second-generation COVID-19 variant nicknamed “centaurus”, which has multiple immune-evading mutations and has grown rapidly in India, is likely to take over from omicron variants and drive a new wave of infection.
The new BA.2.75 sub-variant is a mutation of the omicron BA.2 variant that caused high caseloads over summer. In less than a month, it has begun ousting omicron variants in India where it is now showing up in 20 per cent of sequences.
Hospitals, already operating at peak capacity, are likely to experience even more COVID-19 cases, with predictions the new more contagious variant is likely to take over. Janie Barrett
A number of leading virologists are now predicting that BA.2.75, which is able to evade vaccine protection against transmission, will fuel the next wave of cases around the world. Sequencing shows centaurus has already spread to other countries including Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Israel and the US.
It is too early to draw conclusions about the disease impact of BA.2.75, but lab work suggests it is multiple times more infectious than the current highly contagious BA.5 variant – already the most infectious of all the COVID-19 mutations.
The existence of eight additional mutations, two of which are already known to be highly dangerous, has led leading virology labs to warn about BA.2.75.
“Surveillance-minded folks – worth keeping a close eye on BA.2.75 – lots of spike mutations, probable second generation variant, apparent rapid growth and wide geographical spread,” eminent virologist Tom Peacock from Imperial College London tweeted late last week.
“None of these individually really flag as that worrying but all appearing together at once is another matter ...”
There are not enough sequences yet to establish accurately how much “fitter” the BA.2.75 variant is over the current BA.5 variant, but lab tests suggest the new variant has a material growth advantage, signalling it is likely to take over.
“Pretty sure the growth advantage of BA.2.75 over BA.5 is real,” said Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary virologist from Antwerp in Belgium.
“Spike mutations also obviously indicative of immune escape. This looks like the winner after BA.5.”
According to work undertaken at the Austrian Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, the BA.2.75 spike protein carries eight mutations in addition to BA.2. This compares with three variations in the BA.5 lineage.
“The number of eight additional mutations in BA.2.75 is remarkable,” said group leader Dr Ulrich Elling, who cautioned it was too early to say if the variant would actually take over as the dominant variant.
The BA.2.75 variant contains two variants that virologists think contributes to its ability to evade immunity: the G446S and the R493 mutations seen in the BA.5 variant.
“As I discussed last month, G446S is at one of most potent sites of escape from antibodies elicited by current vaccines that still neutralise BA.2,” said Jesse Bloom, the American computational virologist who founded Bloom Labs.
The emergence of a second generation variant had long been anticipated by virologists. These are variants of variants – in this case BA.2.75 has emerged from the omicron BA.2 variant.
“Why should we care about 2nd gen variants? Well, they are evolving from already existing, successful variants which already have nasty properties (antigenicity, transmissibility). This might mean it’s easier for them to get the right (or wrong for us) combo of mutations,” Dr Peacock said.
“To use an analogy of climbing a ‘fitness mountain’, each current VOC [variant of concern] has had to climb from the bottom. A second generation variant can start halfway up and capitalise on the gains of its parent lineage.”
Virologists have been surprised at how each wave of omicron sub-variant has been significantly more infectious than each of the previously already highly contagious omicron variants.
This has led to waves of cases since summer, with the latest BA.5 wave now resulting in a fourth wave of infection for the year. Nationally, hospitalisation numbers have remained at around 3200 since Easter, but are expected to now rise again as caseloads surge across the winter from the high level of infections caused by the BA.5 sub-variant.
“We obviously have many interventions to stop people going to hospital,” Sharon Lewin, director of the Doherty Institute, told ABC radio.
“The most important thing is for people to get their booster dose. So only 70 per cent of Australians have had this third dose, and we’re hearing that the majority of deaths, at least in Victoria, are happening in people who haven’t even received their third dose.”
Professor Lewin said there were now anti-virals that could lower the risks of infection and acute care.
But she noted no other country has mandated a fourth vaccination dose, with the evidence inconclusive that it was necessary at a population-wide level. The fourth dose is being made available in Australia to people aged over 65 or who are immune compromised.
US drug giant Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech announced over the weekend that universal vaccines for use against all variants would soon be tested in clinical trials, ahead of a market release later this year.
