‘Pretty troublesome’: US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci on new BQ.1 Covid-19 strain

Just when the United States of America was seeing a downward trend in new Covid-19 cases being recorded every day, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and one of the country’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, sounded an alarm regarding the emergence of a new variant.
Fauci, during an interview with CBS News, spoke about the BQ.1 Covid-19 strain which has already made up 10 per cent of new infections around the country, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“When you get variants like that, you look at what their rate of increase is as a relative proportion of the variants, and this has a pretty troublesome doubling time,” he said. Fauci added that the variant’s mutations might evade medications. “That’s the reason why people are concerned about BQ.1.1, for the double reason of its doubling time and the fact that it seems to elude important monoclonal antibodies.”
Saying that he expected Pfizer and Moderna to come up with updated boosters that can tackle the new variant, Fauci said: “The somewhat encouraging news is that it’s a BA.5 sublineage, so there are almost certainly going to be some cross protection that you can boost up.”

This comes barely weeks after President Joe Biden declared that the pandemic was over in the US. In an interview with CBS programme 60 Minutes, Biden said that the situation was rapidly improving, even though a lot of work was being done to control the virus.
“We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,” the President said.
America has been seeing a downward trend in new Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations. The seven-day moving average of new Covid deaths in the US has also gone down to 323 as compared to over 1,000 in February and March, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.