Last I looked (a couple of day ago) we had 54 subvariants of Omicron listed by GISAID. BA.1 was the one that swept the world first. BA.2 looked more ominous as its spike protein was quite different to BA.1 and BA.3, and it subvariants are the ones I have been most concerned about. Look at the graph below showing the spike protein mutations on the main Omicron variants. You can clearly see that BA.2 looks very different. The WHO should have given it another name in my opinion.
BA.2.2 reeked havoc in Hong Hong in the last few months. It might be the subvariant that China is dealing with in Shanghai.
The Case Fatality Rate(CFR) in Hong Kong even went above 2.5%, whereas the CFR for mots other countries with BA.1 was around 0.1%.
In Australia I have recently noticed that A new BA.2 subvariant has been forming, namely BA.2.3. In the last 2 days BA.2.6, BA.2.10, and BA.2.12 have taken stock too. These new subvariants could have easily formed within the active “virus pool” in Australia which I have estimated will be approaching 1.5 million people. There will ALWAYS be 1.5 million people infected with the coronavirus at any one time in Australia. Most of these people will be vaccinated and asymptomatic.
Currently there are about 44 million active cases around the world, but I would suggest that the virus pool id probably close to 100 million people.
Within these virus pools, the virus is allowed to mutate with the vaccine induced immunity giving it something to mutate against. I have termed there new subvariants “vaccine induced variants”. I first noticed them in July 2021 and that they were appearing in the mostly highly vaccinated countries at the time, namely Israel, and the UK. We now have most western countries are highly vaccinated. The problem is as I have tried to outline so many times, “vaccine complacency”.
Shock horror when I have just found out that Australia has 2 new subvariants of Omicron that are not even listed by GISAID yet, BA.4 and BA.5. Here is a news article. I know very little about BA.4 and BA.5.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-15/new-covid-omicron-variant-ba4-ba5-detected-australia/100994610?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=facebook&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web&fbclid=IwAR3jG5QLnu9FcHaRfoUTPFlBZ85khtxmmSXb0iuRJmClLemOzFJq2wsnwyE