New Omicron Variant Causes Night Sweats, Sore Throat

ADF STAFF

BA.5, the COVID-19 omicron variant behind surging global infection rates, packs a different set of symptoms than previous strains.

Luke O’Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, explained why.

“There is some immunity to it with the T cells [which help protect the body from infection] and so on,” O’Neill said on an Irish radio program. “And that mix of your immune system and the virus being slightly different might give rise to a slightly different disease with, strangely enough, night sweats being a feature.”

Symptoms such as loss of taste and smell were signs of infection from previous strains, but patients diagnosed with newer variants exhibit more flu-like symptoms, Dr. Neha Narula of Stanford Health Care said during an August 1 interview with CBS News Bay Area in San Francisco.

“These are symptoms like body ache, muscle ache, fatigue, abdominal pain, fever and in addition we’re seeing more upper respiratory symptoms such as runny nose, nasal congestion and a painful, nasty sore throat is becoming a bit more common with these newer strains,” Narula said. “Cough can come later in the week and potentially stay a couple weeks after you’re infected.”

People who have recovered from the latest strains also are getting reinfected much faster than patients diagnosed with previous variants. Citing studies from Denmark and Australia, Narula said some patients get reinfected as soon as 20 days after their initial infection.

“Studies on [earlier] variants showed that immunity after infection would last three or four months,” Narula said. “Since omicron has come into the picture, everything has changed.”

On July 15, Africa reported about 1 million new COVID-19 cases over the previous 140 days, according to Reuters. In Nigeria, COVID-19 infections jumped by nearly 324% between June 13 and July 12, according to analysis of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) data by the Nigerian newspaper The Punch.

Experts say BA.5 is far more infectious than any other COVID-19 strain.

“About five times as infectious,” Dr. Debra Powell, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Tower Health in Philadelphia, said in a report by Deseret News. Powell added that more variants are likely to surface.

Tedros Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in late July that the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths had surged globally. Ghebreyesus said BA.5 and BA.4 are driving the latest infections.

“In the past six weeks, the global weekly number of reported cases has almost doubled,” Tedros said in a statement. “As the virus continues to circulate widely, new and dangerous variants are emerging.”