While most people throughout America seem to be entirely done with COVID — whether it’s the masks, the fear, or the lockdowns — but apparently, this pandemic is not done with us quite yet.
This piece of unpleasant information was handed down by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a new subvariant of Omicron known by the label BA.5 starts its run across the U.S. and around the world in general.
“The virus is running freely,” claimed officials with the WHO. “New waves of the virus demonstrate again that covid-19 is nowhere near over,” as reported by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the chief of the WHO.
The new variant is not just working its way across the U.S. “A new COVID-19 wave is ramping up across the European Union,” explained the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control via a release on Monday. The agency claims that the world’s governments should prepare “for a next expected wave in the autumn and winter seasons.”
In China, however, the spread of the BA.5 subvariant brings with it some extreme concerns that megacities such as Shanghai, which houses well over 30 million people, might be forced to retreat back into lockdown.
This past Tuesday, the White House called on Americans to get another dose of the booster shot for COVID, this time to try and deal with BA.5, which has cemented itself as the main variant across the United States.
An estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now stated that BA.5 accounts for roughly 65% of all reported COVID cases throughout the country and another strain, known as BA.4, is responsible for 16% of total infections.
“BA.5 is something we’re closely monitoring, and most importantly, we know how to manage it,” explained the White House’s COVID response coordinator, Ashish Jha, in a Tuesday release.
“We can prevent serious illness, we can keep people out of the hospital and especially out of the ICU, we can save lives, and we can minimize the disruptions caused by COVID-19,” stated Jha. “And even in the face of BA.5, the tools we have continue to work.”
The new BA.5 worries scientists due to the fact that it can bypass protections and infect those who have been vaccinated or have already had COVID.
Just last month, a panel of independent advisers that work alongside the Food and Drug Administration chose to commend creating entirely new COVID vaccines in order to deal with the Omicron variant.
In a staggering 19-2 vote, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee chose to approve such a plan to create new vaccines as early as October. The panel claims that the newly created vaccines would be needed to deal with subvariants of Omicron that are sure to pop up.