Coronavirus: Highly infectious Omicron BQ.1 sub-variant now found in India, experts warn it ‘should not be ignored’

Top American physician-scientist and immunologist, Dr Anthony Fauci, in an interview with CBS News, said that the two descendants of Omicron’s BA.5 subvariant, called BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, have dangerous “qualities or characteristics that could evade some of the interventions we have”.

“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,” Dr Fauci explained the danger.

Experts believe that variants like BQ.1 could even evade the immunity that people have built from prior infections or vaccination.