September 19, 2023 – The highly mutated version of the COVID-19 virus called BA.2.86 has already infected people in 10 US states, in accordance with a world COVID tracking database.
BA.2.86 has greater than 30 mutations within the a part of the virus accountable for invading healthy cells and thus causing infection. The sheer variety of mutations has caught the eye of scientists and public health officials, who fear the design may very well be a recipe for the subsequent wave of COVID as winter approaches.
The data, published on GISAIDshowed that BA.2.86 infections have occurred in Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington state.
According to the CDC, BA.2.86 has also been detected in wastewater within the United States Wastewater tracking report. But cases within the U.S. are still so rare that BA.2.86 will not be reported by the federal agency's regular variant tracker.
CDC officials concluded that BA.2.86 is spreading inside communities, in accordance with a press release Friday updatebut will not be increasing rapidly and will not be driving the present surge in infections or hospitalizations.
In a study reported intimately earlier this month and published Monday within the journal The lancetJapanese researchers expressed concerns that BA.2.86 could “spread silently around the world.”
Led by a team from the University of Tokyo, scientists conducted laboratory tests that showed that protection from vaccination or previous infection against BA.2.86 is probably not as effective in comparison with other common virus strains.
“Overall, these results suggest that BA.2.86 is one of the most evasive variants with the highest immunity to date,” the authors write.
Other early laboratory experiments have shown that antibodies produced by vaccines and former infections actually trigger an antibody response against BA.2.86, the CDC said reported September 8th. At the time, the agency noted that real-world data was the very best strategy to determine how well immunity from vaccination or prior infection protects against serious illness from a BA.2.86 infection.