This key indicator may determine how bad a BA.2 wave could be in the US

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Thu, 2022-03-17 19:36 — mike kraft

This key indicator may determine how bad a BA.2 wave will be in the US As America casts a wary eye on rising cases caused by the BA.2 subvariant in Europe, the immune status of adults over the age of 65 will be a key indicator of how future variants will affect the US. Brenda Goodman and Deidre McPhillips, CNN CNN

(CNN) With a new version of the Omicron coronavirus variant picking up steam in the United States, as many as 28 million seniors remain at risk of becoming severely ill from Covid-19, either because they are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, or because it has been more than five months since their second or third dose of a vaccine, according to a CNN analysis of federal data.

As America casts a wary eye on rising cases caused by the BA.2 subvariant in Europe, the immune status of adults over the age of 65 will be a key indicator of how future variants will affect the US because the risk of severe outcomes rises dramatically with age.

"It's really looking at that older age group and how much prior immunity they have, either from previous infection or vaccination, that I think has been the best indicator so far of how severe a given number of cases is going to end up being in terms of hospitalizations and deaths," said Stephen Kissler, who specializes in infectious disease modeling at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health.

An analysis by the UK Health Security Agency shows that the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron is growing about 80% faster than BA.1, the virus that caused the last wave of infections in the US over the winter. Cases and hospitalizations are rising in the UK and several other European countries where BA.2 has become the dominant strain. ...

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