Israel: New BA.1/BA.2 recombinant variant discovered

Asia, BA.1, BA.2, Coronavirus, Hospitalization, Infection, Israel, Omicron, PCR, Recombination, Symptoms

The Israeli Health Ministry has announced that two cases of a previously unknown recombinant SARS-CoV-2 variant have been discovered in Israel in recent days.

The novel variant, a combination of Omicron’s dominant subvariant BA.1 and another subvariant, BA.2, causes light symptoms including low fever, muscle aches and headaches, and did not require special treatment.

“This variant is still unknown around the world,” the Health Ministry said, adding that the cases were diagnosed in PCR tests taken from arriving Israeli passengers at Ben Gurion Airport.

“We’ve seen several variants that have made this merge [between Omicron and BA.2] in the past few weeks, but they don’t reproduce at a fast pace,” said Dr. Oren Kobiler, a virologists from Tel Aviv University.

 

 

Preprint: Evidence for Delta and Omicron recombination in the US

 

 

Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

** This post was originally published on March 16, 2022 **