Just as people have become familiar with the BA.2 variant, two new COVID-19 subvariants have popped up under the watchful eye of the World Health Organization.
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Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Regional Campuses at UCSF, told KCBS Radio's "Ask An Expert" the variants, known as BA.4 and BA.5, are siblings of the BA.2 variant.
"All these are flavors of omicron," Chin-Hong explained. "The BA series, which is omicron, is so dominant and there’s so much transmission going on and at the same time they're having all these different strains, so what's happening is events where different friends of the BA flavor are getting together and they’re having children,"
BA.4 and BA.5 were discovered in South Africa. The UCSF professor said there are two main reasons why variants continue to emerge in the country.
"The first is that there's a large proportion of folks who have persistent infection, there's a large immunocompromised population there, so when you have persistent infection it just gives more chance for different strains to come together," he said. "The second reason is that South Africa, as well as Denmark and the U.K., have very good surveillance systems, so that when things are detected it might not be that other places don’t have it, they're just detecting it earlier."
Chin-Hong said even the United States detects COVID-19 variants slower than South Africa.
To battle BA.4, BA.5 and any other viruses which may pop up in the future, Chin-Hong said health experts are considering creating a vaccine that attacks characteristics of the variants that don't change from virus to virus. For example, the spike protein has been modified significantly since the original Wuhan virus, so scientists would focus on other parts of the variant that are consistent.
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