The Omikron variant BA.5 is spreading around the world at breakneck speed. According to the WHO, this not only increases infections, but also deaths. An epidemiologist explains why.
“Half of the sequences discovered in the past four weeks are omicron BA.5.” WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove explained in a status update on Twitter. The variant is spreading worldwide and, at 88.8 percent, accounts for well over half of all new infections in Germany.
According to Van Kerkhove, there are various reasons why BA.5 is so rampant. Above all, it is due to the fact that many people meet and thus mix groups – without them adhering to masks or distance rules.
And the increase in BA.5 cases has consequences. “The deaths have also increased in the past five weeks,” warns the pandemic expert. She gives the following explanation for this: It mainly affects groups that are not well protected. Because they
This also applies to Germany. “Unfortunately, we keep taking in high-risk patients with only incomplete Sars-CoV-2 vaccination,” writes intensive care physician Stefan Kluge on Twitter. Most recently, they had only taken in an over 90-year-old Covid patient who had only been vaccinated once, explains the director of the intensive care clinic at the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Hospital.
“The patients who still die from this disease today are almost always severely immunosuppressed, so they have a severely weakened immune system,” explains pneumologist and infectiologist Markus Unnewehr in an interview with FOCUS online.
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However, this does not automatically mean that BA.5 is more pathogenic, i.e. more disease-causing. The virus is proven to be more infectious. So many more people are currently getting infected – including those who have already been vaccinated or have recovered. If the virus then not only affects more people, but also unvaccinated people from risk groups, the courses will be more severe and therefore fatal. It is not yet certain whether the variant itself is actually more morbid.
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According to epidemiologist Van Kerkhove, the rapid increase in the number of deaths is particularly alarming.
“Of the top 50 countries that saw an increase in the number of deaths, 35 saw an increase of 100 percent or more,” she warns – more than a doubling of cases. “Those are not the trends we want to see.”
Three countries had even recorded an increase of more than 1000 percent in the past week. She doesn’t mention what it was. However, according to Kerkhove, around half of the deaths detected in the past week can be traced back to the USA and around a third to Europe. !function(){var t=window.addEventListener?”addEventListener”:”attachEvent”;(0,window[t])(“attachEvent”==t?”onmessage”:”message”,function(t){if (“string”==typeof t.data
However, there is also good news: that our measures “continue to work, even against all variants and sub-variants”. To do this, we would only have to consistently comply with and use them.
“We need to focus primarily on vaccinations, especially for the people who are most at risk,” she says. “These vaccination gaps should now be closed,” says intensive care physician Kluge, referring to the patients, who mainly come from risk groups.
But other measures that reduce the risk of infection are also important, according to the WHO epidemiologist. These include
“That doesn’t mean you can’t live your life,” Van Kerkhove stresses. “But we want you to do this a little more safely.”
