While BA.5 remains the most prominent COVID-19 variant, accounting for 67.9% of the country's coronavirus cases, its dominance appears to be waning as other omicron subvariants grow in numbers.
Chicago's top doctor said that she's "a little concerned" by the shift in variants in a Facebook question-and-answer session earlier this week, which comes ahead of the winter season, a time of year that has historically seen some of the largest COVID surges.
"But the reason we are still low risk - and that's why we do that low, medium and high risk for variants - is because everything is still omicron," Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said, noting that the variants currently in circulation remain subvariants of the omicron strain that wreaked havoc on the country last winter.
That's good news, she said, because experts believe the new bivalent COVID booster shots, which were formulated to target the omicron variant, and later tweaked to specifically address the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, may also protect against other omicron subvariants circulating, like the BA.4.6 or BF.7.
It remains unclear whether those new bivalent boosters will protect against infection in general, with studies still underway even as Americans get the shots.
Germany's health minister warned at the end of September that the country is seeing a steady rise in COVID-19 cases as it goes into the fall, and urged older people to get the new COVID booster shots. Other European countries such as France, Denmark and the Netherlands are also recording an increase in cases, Karl Lauterbach told reporters in Berlin.
“We are clearly at the start of a winter wave,” he said.
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Arwady noted that while mutations have so far remained under the omicron umbrella, a new variant could spawn that isn't a subvariant of omicron, which would lead to a much bigger challenge in the fight against COVID.
"Variants are the million dollar question when it comes to this winter in the COVID," Arwady said. "All of the subvariants... whether it's the new [BF.7], whether it's the BA.4.6 - those are all still subvariants of omicron. So that is good news in that even where we are seeing some continued evolution of the omicron variant, it's all still in the omicron family, which means that people who get the updated vaccine will have better protection against anything that continues to evolve in the omicron space. The big question is do we get another emergence of a variant that's very genetically different in the way omicron was very genetically different, Delta was very genetically different, Alpha was very genetically different. We haven't had a big new, genetically different variant emerge since really last December, January. It's been almost a year."
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Despite vaccine uptake, Arwady said she is still anticipating a surge in the coming months.
"I haven't seen anything really scary yet on the horizon, but I do think we're going to see a COVID surge. I would be the happiest person alive if we get to February or March and we haven't seen even a small COVID surge, just because it's respiratory season and the way that we see flu and RSV and everything else surge in the winter, I think we're expecting at least some COVID surge," she said. "The question is really what does that looked like with variants?"
