An omicron offshoot is causing a jump in new cases across parts of Europe and the United Kingdom, raising worries that a similar surge is coming for the United States.
The BA.2 subvariant, the sister strain of the omicron BA.1 variant that has predominated globally, has gained traction in the countries that have often been harbingers of what’s to come stateside. Public health experts have dubbed BA.2 as the “stealth” variant because it has genetic mutations that could make it harder to distinguish from the delta variant using standard PCR tests.
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Surges in the U.S. have often been preceded by surges in the U.K. and Europe, suggesting that similar upticks can be expected here in the coming weeks.
“We shouldn’t be surprised by this,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who also practices medicine in Pittsburgh.
Case increases have been rising in several European countries, such as France, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, and Belgium, as well as the U.K., according to the Oxford University-run Our World in Data.
Hospitalizations have also ticked up in the U.K., France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, suggesting that BA.2 will cause severe illness in people who are especially vulnerable, such as the immunocompromised and people who remain unvaccinated.
“As we have seen throughout the pandemic, the US has followed Europe by several weeks in our waves of cases. That may happen again here,” said Andy Slavitt, the former White House senior adviser on COVID-19 response.
Increases in both cases and hospitalizations have been most acute in the U.K. Daily new cases there jumped from about 42,000 in the week leading up to March 2 to roughly 77,000 in the week leading up to Wednesday. New hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have also risen markedly in the U.K., from 8,520 the week of March 2 to nearly 11,000 on average the week leading up to Friday.
The omicron wave, which at its peak in mid-January caused roughly 807,000 new cases in the U.S. alone, has receded. Federal health officials have declared it safe to remove masks in most public places, including schools, taking on an approach that embraces living with COVID-19 rather than eradicating it. Many Democratic-run states had followed federal guidance regarding masks and only recently lifted mandates, putting them more closely in line with Republican-led states, which spurned such mandates before and during the omicron surge.
Nevertheless, the Biden administration is keeping an eye on omicron’s sister strain as it moves across the European continent. In the U.S., BA.2 is already believed to account for slightly more than 23% of cases, up from about 13% earlier this month.
“We’ve been watching it closely, of course,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “We currently have about 35,000 cases in this country. We expect some fluctuation, especially at this relatively low level, and, certainly, that to increase.”
While the BA.2 subvariant is not believed to cause more severe illness than its sister strain, it has been deemed more transmissible. Danish scientists determined it could be as much as 33% more transmissible than BA.1. In year two of the pandemic, though, doctors are optimistic that enough people have been exposed to the virus and vaccinated that the subvariant’s effect on hospitalizations and deaths will not be as detrimental compared to the winter omicron wave.
“We’ll probably see BA.2 become dominant, and at some point, cases won’t have that same downward trajectory,” Adalja said. “It’s likely a lot of these will be breakthrough infections.”
COVID-19 modeling experts at the University of Washington estimated this time last month that nearly 80% of the U.S., by mid-March, would have some amount of immune protection from vaccination, previous infection, or both that can recognize and fight off the omicron variant.
Over 75% of adults have now been fully vaccinated, though the booster uptake among those 12 and older remains below 50%.
Booster shots have been shown to compensate for the waning immunity over time following the second dose of a vaccine. A January report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization due to the omicron variant fell to 57% for those who had received their second dose more than six months earlier. A booster shot, meanwhile, restored protection to 90%.
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While the U.S. healthcare system is expected to get a break from crushing patient loads this time around, and antiviral treatments such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid are becoming easier to access, the Biden administration has warned that funding to deal with COVID-19 is dwindling. The White House said Tuesday that the distribution of tests, therapeutics, and vaccines may need to end abruptly or be pared back due to shrinking supplies. Funding for research and development of variant-specific vaccines and more treatments is also drying up, senior administration officials told reporters.
The White House has received pushback in Congress, which ultimately yanked the $15.6 billion allotments for COVID-19 response from the government spending bill. Democrats introduced a stand-alone bill that would bolster the country’s COVID-19 response, but it does not have enough support to pass.
