BALTIMORE — If you’ve recently been infected with COVID-19 or know someone infected, and you probably do, you can probably blame BA.5, one of five subvariants of omicron and possibly the most transmissible yet.
It’s now the dominant strain in Maryland and nationally and, along with a close relative, BA.4, accounts for 70% of U.S. cases. And it’s not just contagious, it’s also adept at evading people’s immune defenses, making it a particular threat.
“What that means is there is a smaller hill for the virus to get over,” said Andrew Pekosz, a professor of immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has been studying the coronavirus. “We’re going to see a lot of infections and reinfections.”
That would be infections in people who are vaccinated and boosted, as well as people who were infected during the last wave.
It’s another frustrating turn in the long coronavirus pandemic, which experts say again calls for vigilance: wearing good-fitting, quality masks in higher-risk situations, distancing, seeking well-ventilated indoor spaces and obtaining every vaccine dose for which people are eligible.
The state and nation are seeing cases creep up, with 1,873 new infections reported Friday, up from a few hundred a day in mid-March, according to the Maryland Department of Health. The ultimate tally is unknown but surely far higher because so many people are testing at home and not reporting the results.
The percentage of people who officially test positive in a state or commercial lab, however, is also ticking up. It was 9.5% on Friday, nearly double the standard threshold of 5% that indicates infections are widespread in the community. The CDC considers spread in most of Maryland to be low or medium, with only Howard County listed as high, designations largely tied to the level of COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Chase Cook, a spokesman for the state health department, said officials are monitoring the pandemic and will provide guidance as necessary.
“Maryland is one of the most vaccinated states in the country,” he said. “We encourage every eligible Marylander to get vaccinated and boosted as soon as possible — safe and effective vaccines are available at hundreds of sites at covidvax.maryland.gov.”
It’s not clear yet how big an impact BA.5 will have on hospitalizations and deaths, though there currently are 536 people in hospital beds in Maryland. That’s more than five times the recent low in mid-April of just over 100, but far from the pandemic high in January that exceeded 3,460.
That number has been rising, though the data don’t show how many are “for or with” COVID-19, said Kathleen Neuzil, director of the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health. That is, how many people are in a hospital bed because they have COVID-19 or just tested positive after seeking medical care for something else.
Neuzil said the rise of BA.4 and BA.5 isn’t surprising because they’ve caused a lot of infections in Europe and South Africa, and the United States has been following those trends. She hesitated to predict exactly how the cases would trend here or when they would peak, given the virus’ unpredictability and other variables, such as how much Americans take precautions absent any mandates.
A third of the country remains unvaccinated and booster uptake so far has been low. The rate of vaccinations for small children, which were recently authorized, also is low, prompting the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and American Academy of Family Physicians to issue an open letter to parents urging them to immunize their kids.
