Stealth Omicron Becoming Dominant? Too Early To Say: IL Officials
CHICAGO — A week after the first "stealth" omicron case was reported in Illinois, health officials say it is too early to determine whether the variant will become the dominant form of the coronavirus, as it has in other places.
The first stealth omicron case in Illinois was reported by Northwestern Medicine, which said the patient tested positive for the variant in mid-January. The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday that the variant has become dominant in places such as Great Britain, Denmark, South Africa and India and that it is 30-34 percent more infectious than the original omicron variant.
The new variant — actually, a subvariant — is said to have as many as 27 genetic mutations not found in the original omicron variant. It has been called a "stealth" variant because one of those mutations could make it more difficult to identify than the original variant.
"Now the question is whether the new sub-variant will extend the tail of cases infected with omicron,” Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, the bioinformatics director at Northwestern Medicine’s Center for Pathogen Genomics and Microbial Evolution, said in a news release last week announcing the first Illinois case.
Northwestern Medicine said that the stealth omicron variant — which researchers call BA.2 — has been reported in 40 countries. In many cases, the countries experienced a plateau in positive cases. In places such as the U.K., India and Denmark, the stealth omicron strain was detected after a sharp decline in new cases.
In Illinois, state health officials announced 60,000 new COVID-19 cases a week after the department of health reported 138,000 new cases. While COVID-19 cases saw a sharp decreases, the number of COVID-19-related deaths didn’t see as big of a drop, with more than 600 deaths being reported on Friday, compared with 843 on Jan. 28.
Last week, state health officials also reported a steep decline in hospitalizations, the biggest decrease since mid-December. The health department reported 3,870 COVID-19 patients in hospital beds — 1,300 fewer than just a week prior. The number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units fell to 684, which is the lowest level since Dec. 10 and almost 470 fewer than three weeks ago, health officials said.
Officials with the World Health Organization expect that it is just a matter of time that the stealth omicron variant becomes the dominant strain as it has in Europe.
Dr. Dorit Nitzan, the regional emergency director for the health organization, said it is unlikely those who were infected with the omicron strain will become reinfected.
Still, the World Health Organized said that the new strain should be prioritized although the variant has not been yet classified as a “variant of interest” by health officals.
"If BA.2 follows the same pattern in the U.S. as observed in countries like the United Kingdom, Denmark or India, we could observe a slowing of the current decline in new cases. In this case, the number of new cases could stabilize for a while before starting to decrease again,” Lorenzo-Redondo said in the news release. “It is still too soon to know because there are still very few BA.2 cases in the U.S.”
This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch
