‘BA.2.75 sub-variant of Omicron has limited circulation in India, doesn’t enhance disease spread’

The highly transmissible strain of Omicron’s BA.2 sub-variant BA.2.75 has been documented to have a limited circulation in India, official sources said on Tuesday, underlining that this lineage has so far not been recorded to have enhanced severity or the spread of the disease.

Currently, the predominant circulating variant of concern of SARS-CoV-2 is Omicron VoC and globally, the BA.2 Omicron lineage has been seen to replace the BA.1 lineage, the sources said.

In India, BA.2.75 has been documented to have a limited circulation and so far, this lineage has not been documented to have enhanced severity or the spread of the disease.

As the BA.2 lineage is evolving, many of its sub-lineages are now developing with a set of distinct mutations. B.2.75 is a similar sub-lineage of BA.2.

The sources also said it is critical to continue to monitor the spread of this sub-lineage and also the other emerging sub-lineages of Omicron. The scale of genomic sequencing needs to be expanded and maintained for an early detection of the variant strains of SARS-CoV-2.

BA.2.75 — the second generation of the BA.2 variants — has high transmissibility and is being said to be behind the recent increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in the country.

There has been an uptick in the number of Covid cases in India. The country recorded 13,086 fresh coronavirus cases on Tuesday, pushing its tally of such cases to 4,35,31,650, while the number of active cases of the infection climbed to 1,14,475.