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A comment on Virological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 BA2 variant: more pathogenic than BA1. Parent comment

Re:Virological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 BA2 variant: mo... by mrtesthah on Sunday February 20, 2022 @10:44PM (#30411747)
It certainly sounds ominous, but the experiments were done in hamsters, whereas human exposure to BA.2 doesn’t seem to pan out the same way.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-16/study-sho...

>Among 95,470 infections analyzed by the national laboratory, 3.6% of those with BA.2 were hospitalized, compared with 3.4% of those with the original strain [BA.1]. Among 3,058 hospitalized patients, 30.5% of those infected with BA.2 developed severe disease compared with 33.5% of those with the original omicron version.

And even if we disregard these real-world results in humans, the hamster experiment found that BA.2 was equivalent in lung pathology and overall fusogenicity to B.1.1/D614G, which is still far less fusogenic than delta. Fusogenicity is linked to lymphopenia[1] and blood clots/stroke[2].

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-021-00795-y

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8664391/

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Re:Virological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 BA2 variant: mo... by data_acquired on Sunday February 20, 2022 @10:49PM (#30411778)
They did test against antibodies from human sera samples (Figure 2E), but as parent commenter noted, this doesn't test for T-cell mediated responses.
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Re:Virological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 BA2 variant: mo... by mrtesthah on Sunday February 20, 2022 @11:31PM (#30412001)
As we’ve seen time and time again it’s T-cells that actually matter.
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