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, PTI reported.
This lineage has so far not been recorded to have enhanced severity or the spread of the disease, they added.
Currently, the predominant circulating variant of concern (VoC) 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.
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.
It is critical to continue to monitor the spread of this sublineage and also the other emerging sublineages of Omicron. The scale of genomic sequencing needs to be expanded and maintained for early detection of variant strains of SARS-CoV-2, official sources added.
BA.2.75 variant
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.
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