A new Omicron subavariant BA.2.75, nicknamed as ‘Centaurus’ was first reportedly detected in India is described as “most contagious subvariant” by health experts is already spreading in “about 10 other countries, including the UK, US, Australia, Germany and Canada”.

Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is quoted saying “It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions. But it does look like, especially in India, the rates of transmission are showing kind of that exponential increase.”

According to some scientists “the variant – called BA.2.75 – may be able to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infection. The latest mutant has been spotted in several distant states in India and appears to be spreading faster than other variants there. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the prominent BA.5.”

Dr. Sabrina Assoumou from Boston Medical Center reportedly told NBC Boston “We often look to see what happens overseas to try to foreshadow what is going to happen here. These particular subvariants have had very different behaviors. There’s been a different mix of infection-acquired immunity versus vaccine-acquired immunity, so it’s a little hard to know how it’s going to behave here in the U.S.”

• ‘Centaurus’: virologists express concern at new Covid subvariant
• BA.2.75: What We Know About the Super Contagious Omicron Subvariant
• BA.2.75: Boston Doctors on Whether We Should Worry About Competing Omicron Subvariant

According to Dr Soumya Swaminathan of the World Health Organization (WHO), the agency is cosely monitoring the new subvariant.

According to virologists, the BA.2.75 subvariant is extra mutations (relative to BA.2) which “could mean that it has had the chance to evolve an advantage over an already successful virus lineage”.

Dr Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, who was the first to identify Omicron as a potential concern back in November 2021, told The Guardian “It’s not so much the exact mutations, more the number/combination. It’s hard to predict the effect of that many mutations appearing together – it gives the virus a bit of a ‘wildcard’ property where the sum of the parts could be worse than the parts individually. It is definitely a potential candidate for what comes after BA.5. Failing that, it’s probably the sort of thing we’ll have come along next, ie a ‘variant of a variant’.”