Document Type

Editorial

Publication Date

9-21-2022

Publication Title

Disaster and Emergency Medicine Journal

Volume

7

Issue

3

First page number:

139

Last page number:

141

Abstract

From the beginning, the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be a huge challenge and burden for medical services [1]. Currently, humanity is dealing with a new wave of the virus that has evolved and presents a new challenge, mainly due to its ability to avoid immune surveillance. Indeed, our main line of defense — vaccines — may be compromised. Omicron variants are characterized by an evolutionary force unprecedented so far. Among the several sublines that have already emerged, the BA.5 strain exhibit higher transmissibility and demonstrates a worrisome immune evasion. According to several laboratory investigations, vaccination-induced antibodies are less successful at preventing BA.4/5 strains infection as opposed to the infections following BA.1/BA.2 strains exposure [2–6]. The hyper contagious BA.5 variant is mainly responsible for the rise in hospital and intensive care unit utilization we are facing in the current times. Within a few months, BA.5 outperformed its forerunners and became the dominant strain in the United States (US). According to the most recent statistics provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this subvariant was responsible for nearly 2 out of every 3 new COVID-19 infections in the US (3.07.2022–9.07.2022) [7].

Keywords

COVID-19; Omicron variants; SARS-CoV-2

Disciplines

Epidemiology | Health Services Research | Virus Diseases

File Format

pdf

File Size

121 KB

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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