• Covid19: More contagious subvariant of Omicron detected, Check details

    Health
    Covid19: More contagious subvariant of Omicron detected, Check details

    Moreover, the samples which confirmed the BA.4 lineage were collected in late May.

    Digital
    Desk: A more contagious sub-variant of the COVID-19 Omicron strain has been
    reported in Russia, a senior official at the national consumer health watchdog
    Rospotrebnadzor said.



    While talking to the media the head of genome research at Rospotrebnadzor's Central Research Institute
    for Epidemiology, Kamil Khafizov said that two national labs had submitted the
    viral genome of the BA.4 sublineage to the VGARus database.



    Moreover,
    the samples which confirmed the BA.4 lineage were collected in late May.



    As per the scientist, the BA.2 subtype accounted for 95 percent of all new cases in Russia.



     "A number of
    recent researches have shown that the BA.4 and BA.5 variants of Omicron
    are a little bit more transmissible than the early forms of Omicron," he
    said.



    Although the BA.2 subvariant
    remains dominant around the world, the World Health Organization's
    director-general cautioned in May that Omicron sublineages BA.4 and BA.5 were
    causing a surge of the disease in unvaccinated countries.


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