1/6 At a private gathering of 33 Pfizer-triple-vaccinated health care workers in the Faroe Islands, 21 were infected with Omicron—a superspreading event among 3-dose-vaccinated people. All received dose #3 within 2.5 months of the event. Very discouraging. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
2/6 All participants tested negative within 36 hours of the event: five with rapid tests and the other 28 with PCR tests. Median age was 45. Only four of the 21 infected had any comorbidities.
3/6 And very similar to the Oslo Christmas superspreader event (where 79 of 80 infected were symptomatic, with 74 having >3 symptoms), all 21 experienced symptoms. There is virtually no asymptomatic infection with Omicron it seems.
4/6 While most had mild illness, moderate and severe symptoms were not as rare as one would hope in a group of young, healthy, triple-vaccinated individuals. Thankfully, none were hospitalized.
5/6 As seen in the Oslo superspreading event and described anecdotally elsewhere, the incubation period was short: 3.24 days on average. Five of those infected still had symptoms at the time of their interview (12-14 days after infection).
6/6 CDC messaging has consistently downplayed the risk of transmission among the vaccinated, & it needs to stop. These people did everything right: they were triple-vaxxed & all tested before gathering. It didn't matter.
Quick BA.3.2 update. Another BA.3.2.2 (S:K356T+S:A575S branch) from South Africa via pneumonia surveillance.
This means that 40% of SARS-CoV-2 sequences from SA collected since April 1 (2/5) and 50% collected after May 1 (1/2) are BA.3.2. Its foothold seems strong there. 1/3
2 interesting aspects of the new BA.3.2: 1. ORF1b:R1315C (NSP13_R392C)—This mut is in all Omicron *except* BA.3. So this may well be adaptive.
2. S:Q183H—First known antigenic spike mut seen in BA.3.2, not a major one, but one we've seen before—eg, LB.1/JN.1.9.2.1 2/3
I think the unusually long branches in the BA.3.2 tree indicate 2 things: 1. Slow growth globally—fast growth results in many identical sequences, if surveillance is sufficient
2. Undersampling—BA.3.2 most common in poorer world regions with little sequencing of late. 3/3
@yaem98684142 @TBM4_JP This analysis is extremely flawed.
There is nothing abnormal about BA.2.86 appearing in multiple countries shortly after discovery. This has been the norm lately w/reduced surveillance. 1/
@yaem98684142 @TBM4_JP The mutational spectrum analysis is poorly done. It cites a single study looking at the mutational spectrum in *three* immunocompromised individuals. Needless to say, this sample size is WAY too small. 3/
@yaem98684142 @TBM4_JP Furthermore, the IC people examined did not give rise to highly divergent variants with a large number of spike mutations. They appear to have accumulated a very modest number of mutations, with few substitutions in spike. The sequences themselves are apparently not published. 4/
Interesting recombinant showed up today from Texas. It's a mixture of B.1.595, BA.1, and some flavor of JN.1. Most of the genome is from B.1.595. The ancestry of this one is clear: it directly descends from a B.1.595 sequence collected in January 2023, also in Texas. 1/11
When the B.1.595 was collected this infection was >1 yr old, w/no sign of Omicron. BA.1 ceased circulating ~1 year prior.
Now a BA.1 spike appears w/just 5 changes from baseline BA.1, none in the RBD—S12F, T76I, Q271K, R765H, S939F.
This is a zombie BA.1 spike. 2/
There are only a few signs of JN.1, & they're scattered. In ORF1a, we see JN.1's V3593F, P3395H, & R3821K, but the NSP6 deletion btwn these—universal in Omicron—is absent. In
M has JN.1's D3H + T30A & E19Q (in JN.1 & BA.1), yet A63T—also in both BA.1 & JN.1 is absent. 3/11
An awesome preprint on the novel, unsung SARS-CoV-2 N* protein came out recently, authored by @corcoran_lab & Rory Mulloy. I’ve previously written on N*’s demise in XEC, the top variant in late 2024/early 2025. But…
1/34
…this preprint, along with another great study by the @DavidLVBauer, @theosanderson, @PeacockFlu & others prompted me to take a closer look...
2/34biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
...and for reasons I’ll describe below, I now believe rumors of N*’s death are exaggerated.
First, XEC is in terminal decline, replaced by variants with full N* expression, so N* is back in fashion.
3/34 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…
@DameSunshine @SharonBurnabyBC B.1.1.529 wasn't/isn't a real variant; it's a placeholder that represents a putative ancestor of BA.1/BA.2/BA.3.
Bad sequences and/or coinfections tend to get categorized as B.1.1.529:—they have enough Omicron muts to be ID'd as Omicron but so much dropout/mixed signals...
1/
@DameSunshine @SharonBurnabyBC ...that a specific designation isn't possible. Travel sequencing in the US is done by Ginkgo Bioworks. Their sequences are generally poor quality & they upload *pooled* sequences—against database guidelines. The B.1.1.529 here are likely low-quality/pooled sequences from GBW.
2/
@DameSunshine @SharonBurnabyBC I think it's entirely possible that a new, divergent variant will emerge this summer. There are hints with BA.3.2 & a 50-spike-mutation BQ.1.1 that has transmitted at least once. Other similar chronic infection-derived variants are undoubtedly lurking all over, unsequenced.... 3/