Last November, the WHO warned of a new highly contagious Covid variant known as Omicron which was responsible for the vast majority of infections worldwide in the last months of 2021 and the first months of 2022.
Since then, sublineages of Ómicron have been appearing, equally or more contagious and capable of circumventing the immunity of vaccines. The last detected have been the BA.4, BA.5 and BA.2.75 variants, the latter better known as Centaurus and which is of particular concern to the WHO.
What is the difference between BA.5 and Centaurus?
Currently, BA.5 is the predominant variant worldwide and responsible for the seventh wave of Covid infections that we are experiencing these days. Last week it was responsible for more than 50% of the cases in the United States and together with BA.4 they accounted for almost 70% of the new infections.
For its part, Centaurus (BA.2.75) was detected in India and other countries and little by little it is spreading by the rest of the world, something that has led the World Health Organization to classify it as a “variant of concern under monitoring”, since it has eight new mutations in the spike.
You have to remember that the spike is the crown-shaped structure on top of the virus and that attaches to cells to infect them.
And this is precisely the key to everything: the greater the mutation in the spike, the greater the contagiousness, according to scientists, and greater evasion of immunity caused by vaccines. In other words, if the subvariant of Omicron BA.5 was already worrying about being more contagious than the original, Centaurus could be much more so.
Although the scientists see it as premature to give data on the immunity and contagiousness of the new subvariant, they do declare that each new strain that appears “it will be more transmissible and immunoevasive” than the previous one.
Symptoms of BA.5
- fatigue or asthenia
- Tos
- Fever
- Headache or headache
- Runny nose
- Myalgia or muscle pain
- Anosmia and ageusia (lack of smell and taste)
- Dyspnea or shortness of breath
- dizziness
Three distinct key symptoms of Omicron
Fatigue, cough, fever or headache are common ailments in infected people. However, the National Institute of Communicable Diseases of South Africa points out three symptoms of the BA.4 and BA.5 variants that differentiate them from the original Omicron lineage (BA.1): diarrhea, sore throat, and a shorter incubation period for the virus.
Symptoms of Centaurus
As for the symptoms, and in the absence of further research in this regard, these would be similar to those of the rest of Omicron’s lineages.
Among the most common are the fever, asthenia or fatigue, headache and cough. However, in the latest subvariants of Ómicron BA.4 and BA.5 some different signs have been detected, such as the diarrhea, vomiting, or severe sore throat.
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