TOPEKA — Although publicly available data may be lagging, doctors at a Kansas hospital system say the prevalence of the BA.2 variant of COVID-19 is slowly increasing and is already affecting the response to the pandemic.
The strain has not yet become the most prevalent strain in Kansas, but as outbreaks become more common in some parts of the country, especially in the Northeast, public health leaders must make quick changes in response. On Friday, the The Food and Drug Administration has restricted the use of sotrovimaba COVID-19 monoclonal antibody treatment because it does not work against BA.2.
States where the variant prevails no longer have FDA approval for use of the treatment.
Furthermore, reports say President Joe Biden is planning an additional round of booster shots for older adults in the coming weeks.
“We don't use sotrovimab now for a week and a half or two weeks,” said Dana Hawkinson, director of infection prevention at the University of Kansas Health System, adding, “We know the prevalence of BA.2 is increasing (in Kansas), but overall , we don't see a big increase in cases yet.”
Sotrovimab was the last monoclonal antibody unaffected by new strains of the coronavirus, after the FDA revoked approvals for several other antibody treatments that did not work against the Omicron variant.
According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 35% of the cases of COVID-19 in the US were caused by BA.2. When tracked by the CDC, the region including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut saw more than half of the cases linked to the variant.
Since the start of the pandemic, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment has recorded more than 750,000 cases of COVID-19 and more than 8,000 deaths.
While case numbers appear to be declining in Kansas, Stephen Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said doctors are still treating patients. Currently, half of those patients are at KU Health System for issues related to COVID-19, and the other half are there with COVID-19.
“If you've been vaccinated, you're more likely to be asymptomatic, so you might be positive, but you might come in for hip surgery or back surgery, and we still record you as positive because that's what we have to do,” said Stites.
He reiterated that the best way to avoid being part of the hospital team specifically for complications related to COVID-19 was not just to get vaccinated but also to get boosted. He noted a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that shows the importance of the additional shot.
“People who had two doses of the Pfizer vaccine could either receive a placebo for their booster or an actual vaccination dose to test the true effectiveness of the boosters,” Stites said. “What they found was a 95% 98% reduction in serious hospitalization and death if you had the booster shot, versus if you hadn't had the booster shot.”
