This one is named BA.2.21.1…..
Just in case you don’t understand?
The Virus is like the Star Trek ‘Borg’…
It just keep’s coming….
Adapting to stay alive and spread quicker, sacrificing potency….
First came Omicron, then came its highly contagious subvariant, BA.2. That subvariant gave rise to its own subvariants, whose share of new coronavirus cases in the United States is growing.
The coronavirus is constantly mutating. While some variants seem to vanish, causing little ripples of surges in their wake, others have kept driving large outbreaks. Experts say a new form, BA.2.12.1, is spreading rapidly and will likely in the next weeks become the dominant form of the virus in the United States. There’s no indication yet that causes more severe disease.
In the week ending Saturday, BA.2.12.1 made up about 36 percent of all new cases in the United States, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s up from 26 percent of cases the week prior, and 16 percent of infections during the second week in April.
(The latest figures are rough estimates, subject to revision as more data come in. Genetic sequencing of the virus is performed on just a portion of samples across the country.)
First detected in the United States by New York State health officials in April, BA.2.12.1 is spreading more rapidly than the first versions of the Omicron variant, which caused a huge surge in cases over the winter. This version descends from BA.2 and appears to have spread even more quickly, although the reasons are still under investigation.
Indeed, the virus seems to keep finding ways to spread more easily. “Omicron was more transmissible than Delta, which was more transmissible than Alpha,” Krista Queen, director of viral genomics and surveillance at Louisiana State University, said in an interview on Wednesday. BA2.12.1 is building on that trend, she added, “and that’s why it’s taking over now, especially in the Northeast.”…