Omicron was declared as the variant of concern by the World Health Organisation during the very initial days. It was this variant that mainly contributed to the surge in the number of coronavirus cases during the third wave in most of the countries. While the number of cases is now declining, the new subvariant BA.2 of Omicron has become a cause of concern. Most experts and even common people are worried about reinfection from the Omicron. At such a time, a Danish study has recently revealed that there are chances that one can get infected with two sub-variants of Omicron, but the possibility is very rare. In other words, there are possibilities that a person can get infected with the Omicron twice. However, the researchers have suggested that the virus load would be less the second time as there are all chances that the patient would develop immunity the first time.
The study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, was led by researchers at Denmark’s top infectious disease authority, Statens Serum Institut (SSI).
“We provide evidence that Omicron BA.2 reinfections are rare but can occur relatively shortly after a BA.1 infection,” the study authors said.
The researchers also said that the reinfections mostly affected young and unvaccinated individuals. It is pertinent to mention that BA.1 and BA.2 differ by up to 40 mutations. Also, BA.2 accounts for more than 88 per cent of cases in Denmark and it has started to increase in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Norway.
Earlier, officials of the World Health Organization had said that coronavirus could manage to escape immunity and vaccines with its variants. It has also been pointed out that all other coronavirus variants continue to decline globally. This includes alpha, beta and delta. But the Omicron variants is still increasing. Among the more than 4,00,000 COVID-19 virus sequences uploaded to the world’s biggest virus database in the last week, more than 98 per cent were omicron.
