Doctor Immanuel Hardtmann holds a syringe with the vaccine Moderna in a temporary vaccination center inside the Excursion boat Alexander von Humboldt on the first day of the #HierWirdGeimpft (Get Vaccinated Here) Covid-19 vaccination campaign on September 13, 2021 in Berlin, Germany. Carsten Koall | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON — While war rages in Ukraine, not much attention is being paid to surging Covid-19 cases across Europe that could soon start to filter out to the rest of the world. The rise in cases across the continent, from the U.K. and France to Italy and Austria, is being driven by several factors: The lifting of most — if not all — Covid restrictions, waning immunity from vaccines and booster shots, and the spread of the more transmissible omicron subvariant, BA.2. “We all hoped and expected a different turn now at the beginning of spring,” Ralf Reintjes, professor of epidemiology at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, told CNBC this week. “But the situation in Europe is a bit bumpy at the moment, and in Germany … the [case] numbers are at a very, very high level, and they’re still increasing and have been increasing for quite some time.” Germany is seeing a surge in cases and has reported daily tallies of new infections of between 200,000 to 300,000 a day in the last week.
Reintjes said that the combination “of everyone thinking and expecting somehow that the pandemic is over now” and the relaxation of what he saw as protective Covid measures gives the BA.2 subvariant “a really good chance to spread extremely wild in many parts of Europe.” “It’s difficult to predict but personally I think it’s very likely that this is going to continue its tour around the globe as well,” he added. “That’s what viruses in a pandemic usually do.” “There are also quite a few reports that people who have got an omicron infection, or BA.1 variant, then a few weeks later got BA.2 infection,” he noted, adding that there is a good chance that this new variant will spread and act like “some sort of new wave of a new pandemic like seasonal flu.” Public health officials and scientists are closely monitoring BA.2, a subvariant of the already highly transmissible omicron variant, as it is accounting for a growing number of new cases in Europe. To a somewhat lesser extent it is also accounting for a growing number of infections in the U.S. and Asia. The subvariant is estimated to be 1½ times more transmissible than omicron and is likely to usurp it as the globally dominant variant. Initial data has shown that BA.2 is a little more likely to cause infections in household contacts when compared with BA.1. It’s not believed currently that the BA.2 variant causes more severe illness or carries an increased the risk of being hospitalized, however further research is needed to confirm this, according to a U.K. parliamentary report published earlier in March.
‘Stealth’ variant
BA.2 has been described as a “stealth” variant because it has genetic mutations that could make it harder to distinguish from the older delta variant using PCR tests, compared with its original omicron parent, BA.1. The new subvariant is the latest in a long line to emerge since the pandemic began in China in late 2019. The omicron variant — the most transmissible strain so far — overtook the delta variant, which itself supplanted the alpha variant — and even this was not the original strain of the virus.