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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 WHO said that the variant isn't one of "concern" but is increasingly being reported throughout the country, while becoming the dominant strain in some parts of the world.
Recently, 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, and it most recently made its way into New York.
To date, there have been four confirmed cases in New York, while neighboring states have also seen the sub-variant slowly emerging.
The stealth Omicron cases were detected in New York between Friday, Jan. 7 and Wednesday, Jan. 12, officials said.
Officials noted that just because the variant was first detected in one area of the state, it doesn’t preclude it from having spread to other parts of the state.
Yale School of Public Health professor Nathan Grubaugh cautioned this week that BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1, and that in approximately a month it became the dominant strain in Denmark, which has been among the hardest hit by the variant early on.
However, the professor said that immunity from BA.1 “should” protect against BA.2, which “probably” won’t be any worse for vaccines, though the data is still pending.
“BA.2 is not yet a significant proportion of the cases in (the region). But considering its first detection from a sample collected on Jan. 8, that could be changing soon,” Grubaugh explained.
“I want to note that I do not think that BA.2 will lead to a significant resurgence of COVID-19 cases. While it’s more transmissible than BA.1, there is a lot of recent population immunity from the BA.1 wave, and hopefully not as many susceptible people to infect.”
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