New Covid Variant BA.2.86: How bad could it get ?
As predicted, SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t finished with us yet…. After a lull in the flow of ‘Variants if Concern’, we now have another Delta to Omicron-style evolutionary jump in the form of BA.2.86. The main concern with this particular variant is that it has lots of spike protein amino-acid mutations. First, just how different is it to past and present variants ? Relative to Omicron BA.2 (its putative ancestor) the BA.2.86 Spike Protein has 34 mutations: 29 substitutions, 4 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to Omicron XBB.1.5 (more recent strain recommended for vaccine development) it has 36 mutations: 32 substitutions, 3 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to the early Wuhan-Hu-1, it has a whopping 58 mutations: 52 substitutions, 5 deletions, 1 insertion. The key point here is that the number of spike amino acid mutations in the BA.2.86 variant relative to BA.2 and XBB.1.5 is comparable to the number of mutations in first Omicron strains relative to Wuhan-Hu-1. Although it’s e...