FRANCE: COVID-19 is again surging in Western Europe due to a “perfect storm” of Governments lifting restrictions, waning immunity and the more contagious BA.2 Omicron subvariant, experts said Monday.
After more than a month of falling cases across much of the continent, countries such as Britain, France, Germany and Italy have all seen a dramatic resurgence of infections in recent days.
In France, cases have risen by more than a third in the week since the Government ended most COVID restrictions last Monday.
In Germany, despite a new daily record of nearly 300,000 infections on Friday, the government let national legislation enabling coronavirus restrictions expire over the weekend. Most German states, which have considerable leeway on applying measures, have however maintained the restrictions.
In Italy, the Government announced on Thursday it would phase out almost all restrictions by May 1 despite rising cases.
And in Britain, where one in 20 people are currently infected, the government removed the last of its international travel restrictions on Friday.
Faced with its own surging cases, Austria announced on the weekend it would reimpose rules requiring FFP2 face masks — just weeks after lifting the measure.
Meanwhile, a new coronavirus variant, first detected two months ago, is making its way across the U.S. and spreading more quickly in the Northeast and West, new data released this week shows.
The BA.2 variant appears to be on its way to becoming the dominant coronavirus strain, having roughly doubled each week for the past month, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
BA.2 is considered by the World Health Organization as a “sublineage” of the highly transmissible omicron variant. It’s a different version of omicron than BA.1, which was responsible for the surge that hit the Northeast late last year.
It has a different genetic sequence from BA.1 and was first dubbed the “stealth variant” because it wasn’t as easy to detect.
Malaysia too expects the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron will soon become dominant in the country, raising concerns given its possible higher transmission rate, health director-general Noor Hisham Abdullah said in a statement on Monday.
– THE BANGKOK POST