With each new variant, the anxiety starts again. As the seventh wave of Covid-19 hits France, and more broadly Europe, because of the BA.5, a new and umpteenth sub-variant of Omicron comes to sow doubt. First detected in India, the BA.2.75, nicknamed “centaur”, is now found in the Netherlands. A first case of contamination was detected in a sample dating from June 26, the Dutch Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) announced on Wednesday.
“The BA.2.75 variant of the coronavirus”, already detected among others in India, Australia, Japan, Canada, the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, “has now also been identified in the Netherlands”, the RIVM said in a statement. “Little is known about BA.2.75,” the Institute clarified, but it “also appears to be able to more easily circumvent the defense built against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus through specific small changes.”
Worrying mutations
World Health Organization (WHO) chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said last week that BA.2.75 was first reported in India and then in a dozen other countries.
She pointed out that there are “still limited sequences” for analysis, but indicated that the subvariant appears to have some “mutations on the receptor binding domain of the spike protein (…) a key element of the virus that binds to human receptors. “It is still too early to know if this subvariant has additional immune evasion properties or even to be more clinically severe – we do not know”, she insisted, while ensuring that the WHO is monitoring the situation.
Variant “under surveillance”
The sample in question in the Netherlands comes from the province of Gelderland (north-west), and was taken on June 26, 2022, specified the RIVM, which will look if a source search is possible and “closely follows the situation “.
BA.2.75 was listed on July 7 by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) as a “variant under surveillance”. Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, tweeted in late June that BA.2.75 was “worth watching” because it contains “lots of peak mutations”, is a “probable second-generation variant”, with “apparent rapid growth” and “wide geographical spread”.