The COVID variants dominating this fall mean we’re still in the Omicron era.
Omicron-spawn BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 now lead the US COVID variants, eclipsing the previously dominant BA.5 two to one, the CDC reported Friday.
like dr Jake Lemieux, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical System and an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said Thursday, “The bottom line is that we’re still in the omicron era, or omicron-plus era.”
BQ.1, a spin-off of fellow Omicron BA.5, is the nation’s leader in infections and is expected to comprise 26% of national cases, according to the agency’s Nowcast report, valid through Saturday. On its heels is its child BQ.1.1, which is estimated to be fueling just under a quarter of infections.
Former world leader BA.5, which caused the most cases this summer, took third place with 24% of infections. Last week, for the first time, it was responsible for an estimated 34% of infections.
“The most important thing to note is that BA.5 was largely outperformed by BQ.1 and BQ.1.1,” Lemieux said of COVID at a news conference Thursday.
For most people, that’s a relatively good thing given previous fears that newer, more immune-preventable Omicron variants like the ones we’re seeing now could spark a major wave of infections that could challenge hospital capacity later this year.
Indeed, the number of COVID cases across the country appears to be holding steady — not rising as some, including White House officials, feared this spring. But with testing at an all-time low and most testing being done at home, the data received and provided by public health officials is “less and less useful,” Lemieux said.
Still, US hospitalizations and deaths — once thought to be poor indicators of the virus’s progress due to their lag behind a surge in cases — are also remaining stable, and that’s relatively good news. They are now some of the most reliable indicators of the pandemic, he said.
The bad news in this week’s forecast concerns those who are immunocompromised and rely on monoclonal antibodies, hospital-administered IV treatments given to those most at risk of serious illness from the virus.
New variants like BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 have rendered “our last viable monoclonal antibodies” useless, Lemieux said. This means that existing treatments are not effective for people infected with earlier variants.
This week, the CDC added another variant to the list of those it tracks: BF.11, another BA.5 descendant. While the latest Omicron strains have greater immune evasion abilities than previous strains, they all appear to be quite similar to their current competitors. And in terms of symptoms, they seem almost identical to the versions of Omicron that dominated this spring and summer, like BA.4, BA.5, and BA.2.12.1.
An ever-growing list of Omicron variants is in the race for dominance this winter, Dr. Moritz Gerstung, Professor of Computational Biology at the German Cancer Research Center, on Thursday.
“Whoever wins is very likely to have predictable characteristics,” he said.
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