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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Omicron, which is known as B.1.1.529, has three sub-variants: the original BA.1 that remains the dominant strain, the “stealth” BA.2, which is picking up steam, and the more elusive BA.3.
The new “stealth” variant - named for its difficulty to identify due to a lack of certain genetic characteristics - has been becoming more of a concern after it made its way from Europe to the US and slowly is emerging.
According to health officials, they are chiefly concerned that the virus could spread among older Americans, with upwards of 28 million seniors still at-risk for severe COVID illness due to being unvaccinated, only partially vaccinated, or unboosted against the virus.
The immune status of adults over the age of 65 will be a key indicator of how future variants will affect the US because the risk of severe outcomes rises dramatically with age.
“It's really looking at that older age group and how much prior immunity they have, either from previous infection or vaccination, that I think has been the best indicator so far of how severe a given number of cases is going to end up being in terms of hospitalizations and deaths," Stephen Kissler, who specializes in infectious disease modeling at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health, said to CNN.
With the BA.2 variant beginning to spread in Europe and Asia, prompting another new rise in infections and new hospitalizations, some are concerned that the US could see a similar pattern, with seniors at the greatest risk of becoming superspreaders for the variant.
Officials noted that new samples suggest the “stealth” variant is accounting for approximately 25 percent of new COVID-19 infections, up. from around one-tenth a week ago.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Tuesday, March 15 that the BA.2 sub-variant now represents 23 percent of newly-reported COVID-19 cases across the country.
The sub-variant is also spreading rapidly in China — where officials are re-instituting lockdown measures — and in Europe, where some countries are seeing a second omicron wave.
Some studies in Europe have found that the new variant could potentially be even more transmissible than the Delta variant, which was more easily spread than the initial Alpha variant.
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