{"id":1108,"date":"2022-03-22T01:50:20","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T01:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linksus.net\/new-covid-variant-is-spreading-across-the-us-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-ba-2-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2022-03-22T01:50:20","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T01:50:20","slug":"new-covid-variant-is-spreading-across-the-us-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-ba-2-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/2022\/03\/22\/new-covid-variant-is-spreading-across-the-us-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-ba-2-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"New COVID variant is spreading across the US. Here's what you need to know about BA.2 – USA TODAY"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new coronavirus variant<\/a>, first detected two months ago, is making its way across the U.S. and spreading more quickly in the Northeast and West, new data released this week shows<\/a>.
The BA.2 variant appears to be on its way to becoming the dominant coronavirus strain, having roughly doubled each week for the past month, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and\u00a0Prevention.\u00a0
BA.2 is considered by the World Health Organization<\/a>\u00a0as a “sublineage” of the highly transmissible omicron variant. It’s a different version of omicron than\u00a0BA.1, which was responsible for the surge that\u00a0hit the Northeast<\/a> late last year.
It has a different genetic sequence from BA.1 and was first dubbed the “stealth variant” because it wasn’t as easy to detect.
Around the world, infections are largely from the BA.2 version of omicron<\/a>.\u00a0In the U.S., BA.2 accounted for about a quarter (23.1%) of the cases for the week ending March 12, the CDC says. That’s up from 14.2% the week ending March 5.
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COVID-19 update:<\/strong>There may be a new COVID variant, Deltacron. Here’s what we know about it.<\/a>
BA.2 made\u00a0up 39% of cases in New Jersey and New York,\u00a0the week ending March 12, up from 25.4% the previous week, the CDC says. (Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are also included by the CDC\u00a0in that region’s COVID-19 case breakdown.)
In the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont), BA.2 accounted for 38.6% of cases, up from 24% the previous week, according to the CDC.\u00a0
In the West, which includes Arizona, California and Nevada, BA.2 accounts for 27.7% of cases, up from 17.1% the previous week. In the upper West, including Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, BA.2 made up 26.2% of cases, up from 16%, the CDC says.\u00a0
BA.2 cases have risen in recent weeks in the rest of the U.S., accounting for\u00a012% to 20% of cases in other states for the week ending March 12.
Studies have shown that BA.2 is “inherently more transmissible”\u00a0than omicron BA.1, according<\/a> to the World Health Organization.\u00a0
What’s not yet known is if BA.2 causes severe illness as did omicron BA.1, which prompted a rapid surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths for a month before plummeting just as quickly.
While\u00a0omicron BA.1 was considered milder than the virus’ original strain and the delta variant, it led to a increase in deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S.: 60,000 in January 2022, twice the amount of deaths in November, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota<\/a>.
“We often don’t know until it’s too late,” said Stephanie Silvera, an infectious disease specialist at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. “That’s been the problem with managing these surges. Deaths are one of the last impacts we see.”
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So far, it doesn’t look as if BA.2 is making a noticeable impact. But public health officials say they are closely monitoring its spread.
Key\u00a0metrics such as cases, hospitalizations and\u00a0deaths continue to drop almost every day\u00a0and are hovering around levels last seen in July before the delta variant surge.
Daily reported deaths<\/a> have ranged from 1,685 to 2,076 in March after deaths of 3,000 or more a day\u00a0for much of January and February.
The plummeting metrics have led to the lifting of state mask mandates<\/a> \u2013\u00a0in schools and public buildings \u2013\u00a0in what officials consider a return to normalcy.\u00a0
On Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he expects cases to rise in the state because of surges in parts of Asia and Europe. But he said he doesn’t\u00a0expect to reinstate “universal statewide mandated protective measures.”
Health officials are uncertain what BA.2 will do, however.\u00a0
“It\u2019s difficult to predict how COVID-19 variants or any other emerging respiratory virus will evolve over time and what their specific impacts will be,” said Dr. Tina Tan, New Jersey state epidemiologist. “And it is hard to predict whether a surge in BA.2 will translate to increased hospitalizations or deaths at this time.”
Vaccines were shown to be as effective against BA.2 as they were against omicron BA.1, according<\/a> to British scientists. That means the vaccines\u00a0may not prevent infection, but they work well in fending off severe illness.\u00a0
If you were infected by omicron BA.1, you may also have good protection against BA.2, according<\/a> to the World Health Organization.
While reinfection is possible, studies suggest that infection with BA.1 “provides strong protection” against reinfection with BA.2.
The hundreds of thousands of infections in New Jersey during the omicron surge “suggest that many residents may have some protection against BA.2,” Tan said.
Europe and parts of Asia have seen a rise in cases in the past few weeks, but it’s not yet clear how much\u00a0BA.2 is to blame.\u00a0
The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Italy saw an upswing last week. Many European countries have begun treating the virus as a part of daily life and are forgoing full shutdowns.
China ordered\u00a0a lockdown of residents in the city of Changchun, closed schools in Shanghai\u00a0and urged\u00a0the public not to leave Beijing last weekend\u00a0amid a new spike.
Hong Kong has seen its worst spike in recent weeks after limiting COVID-19’s spread for almost two years with some of the world’s most stringent health mandates.\u00a0Hong Kong has reported more than 700,000 infections and about 4,200 deaths, most of them in the past three weeks, according to Reuters<\/a>.
The more times a virus replicates, the more chances it has to mutate into a stronger strain, as seen with delta and omicron.\u00a0
That has some public health experts worried about the surge in Asia and elsewhere.\u00a0
“I\u2019m more worried that the sheer biomass of virus in these places that are now experiencing major waves of omicron will lead to the emergence of new strains, of which we in the U.S. have not yet experienced,” said Daniel Parker, an infectious disease expert\u00a0at the University of California, Irvine. “That could certainly lead to spikes in cases like what we saw with delta and omicron.”
Contributing: Karen Weintraub<\/em>
Follow on Twitter: @mikesnider<\/a> and @newsfallon<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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A new coronavirus variant, first detected two months ago, is making its way across the U.S. and spreading more quickly in the Northeast and West, new data released this week shows.The BA.2 variant appears to be on its way to becoming the dominant coronavirus strain, having roughly doubled each week for the past month, according […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":869,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/869"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}