A New Type of Omicron Has Now Emerged in Multiple Countries
MARIANNE GUENOT, BUSINESS INSIDER
9 DECEMBER 2021
A new version of the Omicron coronavirus variant was designated on Tuesday that experts say will be harder to track because of its genetics.
The new lineage, called BA.2, has been spotted seven times so far across South Africa, Australia, and Canada.
BA.2 is genetically quite different from the original Omicron lineage, now called BA.1, which has been spreading across the world, said Francois Balloux, the director of the University College London Genetics Institute, per The Guardian.
Crucially, it doesn't have the characteristic S-gene dropout mutation which allows Omicron BA.1 to be easily identified via PCR test results, the main way the variant has been tracked so far.
That means that "the two lineages may behave differently," he said, The Guardian reported.
While the change will make tracking harder, it is "nothing to be scared of yet" said Vinod Scaria, a clinician and computational biologist at the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, in a tweet.
David Stuart, a professor of structural biology at Oxford University, agreed.
"I don't think there's any reason to think that the new outlier is any more of a threat than the form of Omicron that's knocking around at the moment in the UK," he said, per the Financial Times.
"But it is terribly early," he added.
more
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-omicron-variant-has-been-found-and-it-s-now-even-harder-to-identify
