How Bad Is the BA.5 COVID Variant Really?
If you have recently been exposed to COVID, chances are good that it was BA.5, which is currently the dominant strain in the US. This new version of COVID is worrisome, although it is not much different from the previous ones. Here’s what you need to know.
Where did BA.5 come from?
In fact, this is not a completely new option. BA.5 is a branch of the Omicron family tree. If you remember, first we had the original version of SARS-Cov-2, then we had the alpha version around Thanksgiving 2020, then we were beaten by Delta in the summer and fall of 2021, and then Omicron came along in late 2021. (You can see the peak of each option is obvious if you look at the graph of COVID hospitalizations over time.)
The original Omicron strain was BA.1. It was then followed in the US by the BA.2. Now BA.2 is declining while BA.5 (and its close relative, BA.4) is rising. BA.4 and BA.5 are so similar to each other that you will often see health officials refer to them collectively as “BA.4/5”.
Are vaccines outdated?
No. Your immunity (from a vaccine or from a previous infection) is not useless. People should stop saying this. However, BA.5 is so different from previous strains that your immunity will not give you perfect protection.
The vaccines currently on the market are still the same composition as they were when they were first approved. In other words, they were based on the original COVID flavor. Since then, the virus has mutated greatly. The revised vaccines should be available this fall and are expected to provide more protection against BA.5 than existing vaccines.
Despite this, people who received older vaccines are still fairly well protected against serious illness. If you have been vaccinated and have a mild case of COVID, it is highly likely that your vaccination status has kept the disease mild. For example, this B.1 Omicron study found that people who were not vaccinated were 23 times more likely to be hospitalized than people who were vaccinated and revaccinated.
Are we all going to get sick again?
You may also have heard that it is now possible to re-infect with BA.5 every couple of weeks. This is also based on a misunderstanding. Omicron is so different from Delta that you can buy Delta and then, in just a few weeks, buy Omicron . But that’s not the same as saying you can buy Omicron again and again.
We have no evidence that this is the case. In fact, most people who become infected with BA.5 are people who have not previously had COVID. Re-infection may seem like a new phenomenon, but that’s partly because not many people got infected in the first year or two of the pandemic. Last winter, the percentage of people who recovered from COVID jumped from 30% to 60%. As science journalist Ed Yong points out, “We’re hearing more and more about reinfection now, in part because the number of people who can be reinfected has doubled.”
So: Yes, the virus can bypass some of our defenses (against vaccines and against previous infections). It is important to continue to try to avoid infection, even if we have been previously infected, and these updated vaccines will come in very handy when they arrive. But the bottom line is that it’s the same old virus, just with a different flavor .