“We know how to manage it,” Dr. Ashish Jha, coordinator of the White House’s response to COVID-19, said in a virtual press briefing. “We can prevent serious diseases. We can save lives and we can minimize disruptions caused by COVID-19.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the BA.5 subvariant now accounts for 65% of current cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said BA.5 “essentially avoids the neutralizing antibodies” induced in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected. Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images) But Fauci said current vaccines “remain effective in preventing serious COVID-19 outcomes,” such as hospitalization and death — and urged Americans to stay up-to-date with their COVID-19 vaccines. “The threat to you is now,” he said. “If you’re not fully vaccinated … then you’re putting yourself at increased risk that you can mitigate by getting vaccinated.” The warnings Tuesday from Fauci and other top COVID officials come as the U.S. moves into what experts describe as a new phase of the pandemic. Call it the era of recontamination. “BA.5 puts the nail in the coffin of the myth that the virus will evolve into a milder form and disappear,” Dr. Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Institute for Translational Research, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. “We could easily see more variants—indeed a whole new family with a more extensive immune evasion and growth advantage—in the coming months.” At first, COVID-19 seemed like a finished infection. Not anymore. The main culprit is BA.5, which has a series of mutations that make it better than any of its predecessors at avoiding whatever immune defenses we’ve built up over two and a half years of infection and vaccination and then infecting us anyway. The story continues The BA.5 isn’t the first variant we’ve come across. Both Delta and earlier versions of Omicron also bypassed first-generation antibodies. But BA.5 and its close cousin, BA.4, are unique because they evolved specifically to escape the massive amounts of fresh immunity left behind by the original iteration of Omicron after it swept the world last winter — meaning that the old assumptions about a recent infection completely protecting you from rapid re-infection no longer apply. “We know [BA.5] to be more contagious and more immune,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in Tuesday’s briefing. “Persons with prior infection, even with BA.1 or BA.2, are still at risk for BA.4 and BA.5.” Technicians perform a chest X-ray on an unvaccinated patient with COVID-19 at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn., in February. (Allison Dinner/Bloomberg via Getty Images) None of this will bring the US back to square one. Despite increased levels of cases, there are now fewer U.S. COVID patients in intensive care units than during earlier phases of the pandemic, and the national death rate (about 300 to 400 per day) is near an all-time low . Acquired immunity, multiple rounds of vaccination and improved treatment options are helping — a lot. “Even despite BA.5, the tools we have are still working,” Jha said Tuesday, noting the importance of boosters for people over 50 and post-infection treatments like Paxlovid. But to our immune system, the distance from BA.1 to the heavily mutated BA.5 is “much longer” than the distance between the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and previous blockbuster variants like Alpha and Delta — something which makes it harder to recognize and respond to. According to the latest research, this could mean: So far, the rise of BA.5 in the US has coincided with the decline of earlier versions of Omicron, leading to what appears to be a plateau in national case numbers around 100,000 per day. (The vast majority of infections now go unreported as Americans increasingly rely on rapid at-home tests instead of the PCR tests used earlier in the pandemic.) But reinfections have doubled in recent weeks in places like San Diego County California and positivity tests, hospitalizations, and even ICU admissions are steadily increasing across the country. Experts worry that the virus’s accelerated evolution and new aggressive trajectory — toward greater transmissibility, avoidance and possibly pathogenicity — could put vulnerable Americans at risk in the coming months. According to CDC data, 67% of the US population is considered fully vaccinated, having received the first two doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines or Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose COVID-19 vaccine. However, less than half of those eligible for boosters (47%) have received one and a new booster aimed at BA.5 is not expected until October at the earliest. “It’s very, very clear … that immunity is waning, whether it’s immunity after infection or immunity after vaccination,” Fauci said Tuesday. “If you’re infected with BA.1, you don’t really have good protection against [infection with] BA.5.” And while the daily death toll in the U.S. is lower than it was earlier in the pandemic, it’s still “very high,” Tza said. “We are at a stage of the pandemic where most deaths from COVID-19 are preventable,” he said. “Variants will continue to appear if the virus circulates globally and in this country,” Fauci added. “We shouldn’t let it disrupt our lives, but we can’t deny that it’s a reality we have to face.” To that end, Jha said the administration will issue two reports on the “long COVID” in early August, followed by a strategy to accelerate the development of next-generation vaccines that can protect against all variants of the coronavirus and stop the infection before it starts. “You will hear more from us in the coming days and weeks,” Jha said. “It’s something we’re working on pretty diligently.”
