BQ.1.1 subvariant: This Deadly COVID Twist Is Like Nothing We've Seen Before [View all]

[Celerity]

The new BQ.1.1 subvariant is spreading fast across Europe—and we’re not prepared for just how dangerous it could be.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/deadly-twist-in-covid-variant-takes-the-world-by-surprise



As the wave of COVID infections from the highly-contagious BA.5 subvariant finally subsided in late July, new subvariants were already competing for dominance—and the opportunity to drive the next wave of infections. A little over two months later, epidemiologists are close to naming a winner. In the United Kingdom, infections from a highly mutated subvariant called BQ.1.1 are doubling every week—a rate of growth that far exceeds other leading subvariants. In the U.S., BQ.1.1 is spreading twice as fast as its cousin subvariant BA.2.75.2.

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That means BQ.1.1 is very contagious. But that’s not the subvariant’s most alarming quality. What’s most worrying is that it also evades certain antibodies. In fact, BQ.1.1 seems to be the first form of COVID against which antibody therapies—evusheld and bebtelovimab, for instance—don’t work at all. Luckily, the best vaccines still work against BQ.1.1—especially the latest “bivalent” messenger-RNA boosters. Uptake of the new booster has been shockingly sluggish, however, meaning the new shots aren’t yet offering much protection on a population level.

We have the tools to defeat COVID. But “the reality is nobody is using the tools,” James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast. Highly contagious and immune-evasive, BQ.1.1 is poised to take advantage of an increasingly vulnerable global population as antibodies from vaccinations and past infection gradually wear off in the coming months. The question isn’t whether a fresh wave of infections is coming. It’s exactly when.

“We are stepping into a very fluid phase of the pandemic right now,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast. Michael has built sophisticated computer models for simulating the COVID pandemic. BQ.1.1 wasn’t the inevitable winner of the viral competition that raged, mostly unseen, in the months following the peak of the BA.5 wave. There were other highly contagious and somewhat evasive subvariants, including BA.2.75.2 and BA.4.6.1.

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