Scientists on alert over rising cases caused by Omicron cousin BA.2 | Hacker News Reader

Scientists on alert over rising cases caused by Omicron cousin BA.2

reuters.com

36 pointslsllc6 comments

I read the article and I don’t know what the big alert is. Potentially more transmissible but not more severe. The virus will want to mutate into less and less deadly so it can spread more, not the other way around. Combined with more people building antibodies, honestly I take this as good news.

You are mistaken, it just wants to spread more. Being a 2 times more deadly for being 100 times more transmissible would be not big tradeoff in evolution. It happened with delta, I can happen again.

> In addition to BA.1 and BA.2, the WHO lists two other subvariants under the Omicron umbrella: BA.1.1.529 and BA.3. All are closely related genetically, but each features mutations that could alter how they behave.

Is this semver? Phrased as a joke, but I'm curious if anybody in the field hangs around here and knows how these bugs get their names.

They are "PANGO" names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_Assignment_of_Nam... https://cov-lineages.org/index.html

PANGOLIN, because biologists are funny

These are from the PANGO lineage designation system (https://www.pango.network). They're based on the inferred phylogeny (i.e. family tree) of the various variants. Variant B.1.1.529 (not BA.1.1.529 -- that's a mistake in the article) is descended from B.1.1, which is descended from B.1, which is descended from B (which is the first haplotype that was detected). More specifically, B.1.1.529 is the 529th descendant of B.1.1 that the pango group have assigned a number to; it has no particular relation to B.1.1.528.

So what about "BA"? To keep these sequences from getting too long, they assign aliases, and BA is the alias of B.1.1.529 (they ran out of single-letter prefixes a while ago). So BA.1 is short for B.1.1.529.1, and BA.2 is short for B.1.1.529.2, etc. (And since these are all in the Omicron family tree, they're all classed as Omicron subvariants.) Similarly, the original Delta variant was B.1.617.2, which was assigned the alias AY, so AY.1 (=B.1.617.2.1), AY.2 (=B.1.617.2.2), etc are all Delta subvariants.

The current full lineage list is available at https://cov-lineages.org/lineage_list.html. Note that they're tracking variants in far more detail than any non-virus-nerd cares about. If I'm counting right, there are 1575 non-withdrawn lineages listed, including 210 in the Delta family.

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