Israel’s Health Ministry has confirmed the world’s first two cases of a strain that combines two variants of the coronavirus.
“In an inspection that took place in recent days, two cases of a verified strain combining the BA.1 (ómicron) and BA.2 variant were discovered in the State of Israel,” the ministry announced in a statement on Wednesday.
The agency detailed that both patients have mild symptoms of fever, headaches and muscle discomfort, although it clarifies that a special medical response was not necessary for them.
“The Ministry of Health continues to monitor the results and will provide an update if necessary,” the statement concludes.
In a subsequent tweet, the agency reported that 6,310 new cases of covid-19 have been detected in the last 24 hours. Since the start of the pandemic, 10,401 people have lost their lives to the disease in the country.
Last December, the first case of flurone, a simultaneous flu and coronavirus infection, was recorded in Israel in an unvaccinated woman in her 30s who had given birth shortly before in a hospital in the city of Petah Tikva.
A more infectious subvariant?
According to the Statens Serum Institute (SSI), the body that monitors infectious diseases in Denmark, the BA.2 subvariant is 1.5 times more infectious than its predecessor, although they have not detected differences in the risk of hospitalization.
The SSI indicated that BA.1 and BA.2 have many differences in their mutations in the most important areas. In fact, the difference between them is greater than between the original omicron and the alpha variant, which was the first major mutation to take hold worldwide.
Although some scientists have dubbed BA.2 the ‘stealth omicron’, because it has genetic traits that make it more difficult to identify in PCR tests, the World Health Organization (WHO) has not labeled this variant of concern, if he well warned of the danger of new variants emerging as the omicron spreads around the world at an unprecedented rate.
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