the WHO claims that the Omicron BA.2 subvariant does not cause a more severe form than BA.1

Omicron’s BA.2 subvariant, which is spreading rapidly, especially in Denmark, does not “cause no more severe form” of Covid-19 than the BA.1 variant which circulates widely in the world, said Tuesday February 22 an official of the World Health Organization (WHO). “We do not see a difference in terms of severity between BA.1 compared to BA.2 and therefore it is a similar level of severity in terms of risks of hospitalization”said Maria Van Kerkhove, who oversees the fight against Covid-19 at the WHO, during an exchange on social networks.

This finding “is really important, because in many countries there was a substantial amount of circulation of both BA.1 and BA.2”.

She thus reported the conclusions drawn on Monday by an Advisory Committee of Experts on the evolution of the virus at the origin of Covid-19. These conclusions are reassuring, after the concerns caused by the pre-publication, therefore not controlled by peers, of a study on hamsters which seemed to show that on the contrary BA.2 inflicted more serious forms.

The researchers behind this study presented their results to the committee, said Maria Van Kerkhove. She took the opportunity to call on countries around the world not to dismantle their sequencing devices in parallel with the lifting of health restrictions in many countries.