A new subtype of the highly transmissible Omicron variant has been found near Shanghai, where residents are currently under a lockdown.
The new iteration of the
CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus was reported by municipal authorities in Suzhou, a city that borders Shanghai, on April 2. The strain was isolated from a local infected patient with the surname Yang on March 28.
Municipal officials said the isolated virus had evolved from the BA.1.1 branch of the Omicron variant. What’s more, the subtype did not match other COVID-19 variants already found in China, nor those found in the public virus tracking database GISAID.
Meanwhile, health officials in Dalian, a port city in northeastern China’s Liaoning Province, also found a new subtype from a local infected patient on April 1, according to China’s state-run media. The strain was said to not match any CCP virus found in China and had evolved from the BA.2 branch of the Omicron variant.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are now thousands of coronavirus variants around the world.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2 are the three most common lineages of the Omicron variant.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in its weekly epidemiological
report published on March 22, declared that BA.2 had become “the predominant variant” around the world. The BA.2 stain has been nicknamed the “
stealth variant” because it contains mutations that make it harder to detect.
The BA.1 strain was responsible for a large number of infections in the United States in late 2021. Now, BA.2, which is known to be more transmissible than BA.1 and BA.1.1, makes up the majority of new infections (54.9 percent) in the United States, the CDC
announced on March 29.
The BA.2 variant is also mostly responsible for the new wave of infections in China, with China’s commercial hub of Shanghai being one of the hardest-hit areas. On March 28, the city began enforcing a
two-stage lockdown, with officials ordering people to stay home, restricting access to roads, shutting down non-essential businesses, and launching mass testing. These methods are all part of China’s harsh “
zero-COVID” strategy.
On April 4, Shanghai health officials reported a total of 9,006 new daily cases for April 3.
A day earlier, China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), dispatched more than 2,000 medical personnel to Shanghai, according to state-run PLA Daily. One of their duties is to carry out nucleic acid tests.
There have been many complaints from Shanghai residents who are struggling to carry on with their lives amid the lockdown. Some demand having more access to
food and
medicine, while others complain about how their children have been
forcibly taken away.