“In Europe and America, BA.4 and BA.5 are driving waves. In countries like India a new sub-lineage of BA.2.75 has also been detected,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
New Delhi: A new sub-lineage — BA.2.75 — of the Omicron variant of the Covid-19 has been found in countries like India, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday.
In a press briefing Ghebreyesus said, “On Covid-19, globally reported cases have increased nearly 30 per cent over the past two weeks. Four out of six of the WHO sub-regions saw cases increase in the last week
“In Europe and America, BA.4 and BA.5 are driving waves. In countries like India a new sub-lineage of BA.2.75 has also been detected, which we’re following,” he added.
On the emergence of the new sub-variant, WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said there has been an emergence of a sub-variant that is being called the BA.2.75 “first reported from India and then from about 10 other countries.”
Swaminathan added that there are still limited sequences available of the sub-variant to analyse, “but this sub-variant seems to have a few mutations on the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein. So obviously, that’s a key part of the virus that attaches itself to the human receptor. So we have to watch that. It’s still too early to know if this sub-variant has properties of additional immune evasion or indeed of being more clinically severe. We don’t know that.”
WHO is tracking it and the WHO Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution (TAG-VE) is constantly looking at the data from around the world, Swaminathan said.
