BA.2, the newly detected version of Omicron, is not a cause for alarm, scientists say

"Among all the lineages of Omicron, this is the one showing a higher increase of cases. But we have to be careful in interpreting that, because higher increases from a very low number are easier to observe," said Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, assistant professor of medicine for infectious diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

But Lorenzo-Redondo says that nickname has caused people to think that it can't be detected in lab tests, which isn't the case. The version of the virus that researchers have named Omicron includes multiple viral families. The BA.1 family is the one causing nearly all Omicron infections in the U.S. Now, a second family, the BA.2 clade, is starting to gain ground in other countries, notably India and Denmark.

BA.2 has also been picked up in South Africa and the United Kingdom, where it has been designated a variant under investigation by the UK's Health Security Agency. A variant under investigation is one that's spreading in the country and being monitored because it may spread more easily from person to person or have features that make it more resistant to treatments or vaccines.

At Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, researchers are sequencing the viral genomes of every positive Covid-19 case they find. Out of more than 4,000 genomes sequenced since the first of the year, they've found only three cases of the BA.2 sublineage, said Dr. Wesley Long, medical director of microbiology.

Long says it's hard to know why BA.2 is gaining ground in certain countries. It could be that it has some kind of advantage over the original Omicron variant, or perhaps both BA.1 and BA.2 were introduced around the same time, so they were able to spread at about the same rate.

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