A few points…as this is not exactly an amazing article.
“Also dubbed "stealth omicron," the World Health Organization is reporting cases of BA.2 in more than 40 countries including the U.S., India, Germany and Australia.”
It’s being called “stealth” because it lacks a characteristic mutation that made the original Omicron very easy to differentiate in PCR tests. PCR still detects this, you just can’t immediately ID it as Omicron—you have to resort to full sequencing instead.
And I all I care about…and it’s too early to tell…is if this is immunologically cross-reactive with OG Omicron. Hopefully antibodies still work against this one, so we won’t have yet another spike in noisy infection data.
“Also dubbed "stealth omicron," the World Health Organization is reporting cases of BA.2 in more than 40 countries including the U.S., India, Germany and Australia.”
It’s being called “stealth” because it lacks a characteristic mutation that made the original Omicron very easy to differentiate in PCR tests. PCR still detects this, you just can’t immediately ID it as Omicron—you have to resort to full sequencing instead.
And I all I care about…and it’s too early to tell…is if this is immunologically cross-reactive with OG Omicron. Hopefully antibodies still work against this one, so we won’t have yet another spike in noisy infection data.