Friday, March 29

The variant that can complicate our way out of the pandemic

throughout the last few days, the number of deaths from covid in Mexico it has remained at the highest levels since October. Likewise, in some places hospital occupancy has grown to levels close to those that occurred at the most critical moments of the pandemic.

One of the fears that persist is the appearance of a new variant for which omicron infection does not elicit immunity and aggravates these already worrying trends.

There are some who think that this variant is already here and it is… precisely omicron.

It turns out that omicron already has three subvariants. The BA.1, which was the one originally detected in South Africa and the one that is largely responsible for triggering infections around the world.

La subvariante BA.2, which has appeared in some countries and which apparently it is even more contagious than BA.1, but it does not generate a more severe disease.

And there is the BA.3 subvariant, which has little presence and about which little is still known.

The evolution models of the pandemic in this omicron stage have some significant differences between countries.

On the one hand, there is the case of South Africa, a country in which, after a vertiginous ascent, after 4 to 5 weeks started too a rapid descent.

Something like this can also be seen in the United Kingdom, for example, and it seems that this will be the case in the United States.

But this behavior is not so clear in other European countries, What France or Denmark, where the number of infections has not decreased as in the aforementioned countries.

It seems that there are cases in which the infection of the BA.1 subvariant does not generate immunity against BA.2 and reinfections are taking place.

The good news is that the evidence that exists so far seems to indicate that the vaccines, particularly when there is already a reinforcement, they still work to prevent severe disease and death regardless of the subvariant causing the infection.

In the case of Mexico, there is still no evidence of the presence of this subvariant, but given that foreigners do not have entry requirements in health matters, it can be assumed that it is already present or that it may be in the short term.

Although BA.2 does not basically change the perspectives of the pandemic, which in the course of the coming months could be notoriously reducing infections, it could change the rate of decline in infections, especially in countries where vaccination and booster dose rates are relatively low.

Estimates indicate that only 12 percent of the population of the world has received the booster vaccine. In Mexico there are no clear estimates yet.

In order for the trends of the pandemic to go clearly downward in a matter of a few months, it is vital that the percentage of both people vaccinated with the complete scheme as with booster dose.

It is not impossible that we have highly differentiated trajectories of the pandemic in which in some countries a marked downward trend is maintained.

But if ongoing research concludes that the BA.2 subvariant has the ability to reinfect even those previously infected with omicron, it is not impossible that we still have to wait several months plus to ensure that covid stops having an epidemic character and adopts endemic behavior.

In other words, there is still a relatively high level of uncertainty regarding the effects that covid may cause this year.

Until a couple of weeks ago, the outlook was more optimistic. But, in reality, we do not really know how the virus will behave in the future.



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