Covid-19 settling into more predictable pattern scientists

With an uptick in Covid-19 cases in SA, scientists are wondering how predictable the pattern of the current wave will be.

New research suggests the uptick is not caused by a new variant but is instead caused by two offshoots BA.4 and BA.5

from Omicron, and the patterns will be easier to anticipate.

This fits into a bigger picture of Covid-19 moving from an epidemic to an endemic state meaning we learn how to live with it and manage it as we do with flu, instead of taking extreme measures.

On Tuesday, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) reported the proportion of positive new cases of those being tested was 23% whereas the previous day it was 19%. The actual number of new cases identified in that time frame was 7,523.

According to scientists at the NICD, “as the BA.4 and BA.5 lineages have some different mutations to other Omicron lineages it is possible that there may be some immune escape, leading to an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases.

“However, SA has a high immunity due to previous infection and vaccination, which has been shown to protect against the risk of developing severe Covid-19 disease.”

According to an article that appeared in science journal Nature, several recently released studies “show that BA.4 and BA.5 are slightly more transmissible than earlier forms of Omicron and can dodge some of the immune protection conferred by previous infection and vaccination”.

While the resurgence is clear from the data, scientists do not yet suspect it will cause much of a spike in hospital admissions and deaths.

“These are the first signs that the virus is evolving differently compared with the first two years of the pandemic, when variants seemed to appear out of nowhere,” Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at Stellenbosch University, told Nature after leading one of the studies.