I’ll tell you about the new variants. The post of prof. Silvestri
All about the new Covid variants. The post by Guido Silvestri, doctor, virologist, Professor & Chair at Emory University, taken from his Facebook profile
I try to write it slowly, but I realize they are complicated things.
The "sister" variants of Omicron, in technical jargon called BA.2 / B.1.1.529.2 – the cd. Stealth Omicron, as it does not contain the deletion (Δ69-70) that causes the S gene target failure (SGTF) which in turn causes Omicron to be recognized via simple PCR – and BA.3 / B.1.1.529.3, both contain three mutations in the polybasic site of furin cleavage between S1 and S2 (H655Y, N679K, P681H) which presumably make Omicron's Spike non-cleavable by TMPRSS2, and therefore make the Omicron variant less severe than Delta and other variants.
In other words, from a viral structural biology point of view, there is no reason to think that these two sub-variants of Omicron are more pathogenic than the "original" Omicron (aka BA.2 / B.1.1.529.2) .
Considering also the news that "Deltacron" seems to be a laboratory artifact, as explained by several (real) virologists in the last 48 hours, and in order to avoid that the "apocalypse group" becomes too depressed in the face of this good news, it is considered important specify that:
1. We will all die anyway
2. no one will get out of here alive (cit.)
3. no one can exclude a priori the emergence of new and more bad variants of SARS-CoV-2 (as indeed no one can exclude a priori that an asteroid will destroy our planet in the coming months)
PS: forgive me if today I take a little laugh, but I find it funny that just as even the most funeral of funereal ones are convinced that Omicron causes a generally milder disease, the psychosis starts immediately from new variants …
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/vi-racconto-le-nuove-varianti-il-post-del-prof-silvestri/ on Wed, 12 Jan 2022 07:20:32 +0000.