Shanghai Claims to Have Discovered Yet Another Coronavirus Subvariant

A health worker takes a swab sample from a man to test for the Covid-19 coronavirus in the
Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

Shanghai health officials claimed on Sunday to have recently discovered a new subvariant of the Chinese coronavirus called “Omicron BA.5.2.1,” China’s state-run Global Times reported on Monday, noting that Shanghai’s municipal government has cited the alleged discovery as a reason for locking down parts of the city this week.

Health authorities detected the first case of the new subvariant in Shanghai’s Pudong financial district on July 8, Zhao Dandan, the vice-director of Shanghai’s health commission, told reporters at a press briefing on July 10.

Zhang said the “Omicron BA.5.2.1” infection was “linked with a case from overseas.”

“The Omicron BA.5 variant, which is driving a new wave of COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] infections overseas, was first discovered in China on May 13 in a 37-year old male patient who had flown to Shanghai from Uganda,” Reuters observed on July 10 citing data from the China Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

“Variant BA.5 has been shown to have an accelerated rate of transmission and an improved immune escape capability,” Yuan Zhengan, a member of Shanghai’s municipal advisory group on Chinese coronavirus prevention, said at Sunday’s press briefing.

The Global Times described the “BA.5 subvariant” on July 11 as demonstrating a “higher transmission risk and no obvious change in death rate compared with previous Omicron subvariants.”

The newspaper cited as its source for this description a “Beijing-based respiratory expert” who spoke to the Global Times “on condition of anonymity on Monday.”

Shanghai’s 25 million-plus residents recently emerged from a 65-day lockdown to contain a local epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus from March 28 to June 1. While officials claimed the city-wide movement restrictions lifted on June 1, various lockdowns of residential districts and compounds continued throughout June and July. Shanghai said on Sunday it planned to start a fresh lockdown across several major districts of the city starting on Tuesday to curb its latest Chinese coronavirus outbreak.

“[F]rom Tuesday [July 12] to Thursday [July 14], nine districts and other districts with a record of positive cases will undergo mass nucleic acid testing and during the period, people can move freely with a negative certificate from within 48 hours,” the Global Times reported.

The Chinese coronavirus is also known as “COVID-19,” which is the official name for the disease caused by a type of coronavirus called “SARS-CoV-2.” Health authorities first discovered “SARS-CoV-2,” which stands for “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2,” in central China’s Wuhan city sometime in the fall or winter of 2019. The virus caused an epidemic of its associated disease in Wuhan starting in late 2019, though Chinese government officials waited to officially acknowledge the disease’s transmissibility until it had already proliferated within Wuhan and greater Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital. The epidemic soon mushroomed beyond Hubei to the rest of China and within a matter of weeks had spread globally. The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) declared a pandemic of the Chinese coronavirus on March 11, 2020, that remains ongoing to this day.

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