An expert says it could have emerged after a person was infected with 2 variants at the same time
A Covid subvariant that was spreading across the US has now been confirmed in the UK. BA.4.6 is a subvariant of the Omicron variant and its presence in the UK was confirmed in new briefing documents circulated by the UK Health Security Agency .
BA.4.6 is a descendant of the BA.4 variant of omicron. BA.4 was first detected in January 2022 in South Africa and has since spread around the world alongside the BA.5 variant. Severity, infectiousness and immune evasion Fortunately, omicron infections generally cause less serious illness, and we’ve seen fewer deaths with omicron than with earlier variants. We would expect this to apply to BA.4.6 too. Indeed, there have been no reports yet that this variant is causing more severe symptoms.
The relative fitness advantage of BA.4.6 is considerably smaller than that of BA.5 over BA.2, which was 45% to 55%. Meanwhile, one preprint study shows that BA.4.6 evades protection from Evusheld, an antibody therapy designed to protect people who are immunocompromised and don’t respond as well to COVID vaccines.
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