Variant BA.2.75 (centaur): what we know about this new variant of Covid-19

Another new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus? It would seem: dubbed BA.2.75, this new version of the Covid-19 virus was first spotted in India in May 2022.

Since then, it has spread to the United States, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; In mid-July 2022, the Israeli government also declared having identified the BA.2.75 variant in two patients returning from France.

Nicknamed “centaur”, the BA.2.75 variant derives from the BA.2 variant, which was itself a sub-version of the Omicron variant: we speak of a “second generation variant”.

A worrying variant that seems to be becoming dominant in India

On July 7, 2022, the BA.2.75 variant was classified by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) as a “varying under supervision“. And for good reason : “there is a good chance that this variant has a different immune escape profile than BA.5, meaning that a different fraction of the population might be more susceptible to re-infection“explains Étienne Simon-Lorière, head of the Evolutionary Genomics of RNA Viruses Unit at the Institut Pasteur, interviewed by our colleagues from the Huffington Post.

Moreover, according to the Netherlands Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), BA.2.75 “also seems to be able to more easily circumvent the defense built against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus thanks to small specific changes”.

This new variant “seems to become the dominant strain in India – the question is whether it will become the dominant strain all over the world“concludes Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.

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