South Africa records increase in Omicron subvariant cases

South Africa is seeing more cases of the BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus and is monitoring the situation, but there are still no clear signs that BA.2 is substantially different from the original Omicron, a scientist said on Friday. (4).

Michelle Groome of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases showed in a presentation that BA.2 represented 23% of the 450 samples from January sequenced by the South African Genomic Surveillance Network and the original strain 75%.

Of the 2,243 samples from December that were sequenced, BA.2 represented 4% and the original strain 94%.

“We are seeing this increase with BA.2, we are still trying to get more information on this particular subline… and so we are increasing the sequencing of the provinces where we are seeing increases (in cases) by monitoring the proportion that is due to BA.2 ,” Groome said at a press conference.

“At this stage, there is no indication that there would be… differences between these different sublines of Ômicron. As we saw with Delta, there were a lot of bloodlines and we didn’t see many differences between them, but we will continue to monitor,” she added.

Asked if there were any signs that BA.2 was causing different symptoms, she said she wasn’t expecting any marked changes. Scientists will analyze data on hospitalizations for clues about disease severity linked to the subvariant, she said.

South Africa entered a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections driven by Omicron late last year, shortly after warning the world about the emergence of the highly transmissible variant.

Daily infections began to decline from mid-December after reaching a record of more than 26,000, and have stabilized in recent weeks at around 3,000 new cases a day.

South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said the country was not out of the fourth wave and that there could be a fifth wave closer to winter. He said the last two weeks have been a bit of a “stalemate” in terms of new cases.

“There is no serious decline and there is still no worrying rise in infections,” he said, adding that the opening of schools and increased circulation after the holidays could be reasons why there has not been a greater drop in new infections.