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The emerging variant, called BA.2, is believed to be upwards of 60 percent more transmissible than Omicron, according to infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, though it is not more severe than the original strain.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), BA.2 has been tripling its presence in the US every two weeks, contributing to nearly a quarter of all new COVID-19 cases, according to the agency’s latest update.
Officials said that COVID-19 vaccines and boosters remain the most powerful tool in avoiding serious illness or hospitalizations from the virus.
“It does have increased transmission capability,” Fauci said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “However, when you look at the cases, they do not appear to be any more severe and they do not appear to evade immune responses either from vaccines or prior infections.”
The BA.2 variant has already begun spreading in parts of Europe and throughout China, threatening to quickly become the country’s most dominant variant, supplanting Omicron and Delta, which previously led to a spike in COVID-19 cases in the US.
Fauci said that he and other experts are expecting “an uptick in cases” but it is unlikely that the country sees massive surges similar to the emergence of previous variants.
“I would expect that we might see an uptick in cases here in the United States because, only a week or so ago, the CDC came out with their modification of the metrics for what would be recommended for masking indoors, and much of the country right now is in that zone, where masking indoors is not required,” he added.
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