The Covid-19 epidemic is on a plateau: contaminations are stagnating but the number of hospitalizations continues to increase in France. In this context, should we be concerned about the appearance of new variants?
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The figures show it: the Covid-19 is far from having disappeared from the daily life of the French. And the new “XD” and “XE” variants are there to remind you of the concern. These correspond either to combinations of Omicron and Delta, this is the case of the “XD” variants, or to combinations of two forms of Omicron (BA1 and BA2) for “XE”.
Such recombinant forms can appear when two viruses infect the same cell in the same patient at the same time. At this stage, around 60 cases of “XD” have been spotted in France, while “XE” is more likely to be found in Great Britain. According to Étienne Simon-Lorière, head of the RNA virus evolutionary genomics unit at the Institut Pasteur, there is no worrying signal concerning these two variants: “XE” could be a little more contagious than the BA2, but this remains to be confirmed, as its distribution remains very limited for the moment, and there is no particular severity associated with these two variants.
We also hear about the BA4 and BA5 sub-variants. These are sub-variants of the Omicron strain, “brothers” of BA1 and BA2. Today BA2 remains largely dominant in France since it is involved in more than 99% of contaminations.
>> Covid-19 figures: deaths, hospitalizations, vaccines… Follow the evolution of the epidemic in France and around the world
But since Monday the WHO has actually been following a few dozen cases of BA4 and Bac5 in the world, to precisely verify their dangerousness and their possible ability to escape the immunity provided by vaccination or by a previous infection. At this stage, these very minority variants spotted in South Africa, Botswana, Denmark and Great Britain do not inspire concern. They can infect young and vaccinated people like BA1 and BA2 but the symptoms remain without particular gravity.
These variants do not pose a particular threat to next summer or autumn, but their existence shows that the epidemic is far from over and that we are not immune to the spread of a variant that would behave differently from the previous ones. No one can write a script in advance. This is why epidemiologists recommend the continuation, surveillance, sequencing, isolation of positive people, and the search for treatments. Even if more than 80% of the population is vaccinated.