The rapid growth of BA.5 — the most transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2 yet — is scrambling America’s plans to elegantly move to the next stage of the pandemic with the virus under control. The omicron subvariant, which made up less than one-third of new cases a month ago, is now the most dominant strain in the U.S. BA.5 is troubling for several reasons: it’s better at jumping from person to person than any other strain, and it’s more likely to break through immunity generated by vaccines or infections than omicron and its subvariant siblings. (Experts predict that BA.5 will quickly take over BA.4.)
Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, says it’s worse than delta, omicron, or any other strain of the virus we’ve seen. “There’s a big misconception that in order to be worse you have to kill people,” he said. “If we didn’t have prior immunity from vaccines and boosters and infections and all these combinations of those, it would have been worse than omicron.” The official numbers say that about 100,000 people have tested positive every day for the virus for the last four or so weeks. However, that kind of data is no longer a reliable metric, now that fewer people are getting tested, and states h …