Coronavirus: What to know about ‘stealth’ COVID variant hitting Europe, Asia

BA.2 Omicron subvariant is appearing in Europe and Asia. Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani explains everything we know about this coronavirus strain so far.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: Switching gears, everyone. We've been continuing to keep tabs on one of the new subvariants that we've been watching continue to come into the fray here and into the fold that's being monitored. And we want to bring in our own, Yahoo Finance's own Anjalee Khemlani, who is going to help us break this down, as well as some of the recent tallies that we've seen with regard to the coronavirus as we know it right now. Anjalee.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That's right, Brad. So we know that, of course, we're still battling omicron around the country. We've seen the numbers. And while cases have continued a downward trend, hospitalizations are staying about even, even though they're coming down. And we're starting to see that climb in deaths that's expected in the weeks after. But the unfortunate part is that we are seeing those deaths despite vaccines being available and the level of vaccination that we have in the country, which really sets it apart from what we saw in other parts of the world when omicron hit.

And to that point, we're starting to see another variant now of some variant of the omicron now in other parts of the world, specifically in Europe and Asia that's really making its way around, known as BA.2. It's known to be more transmissible than the omicron variant itself. And while there is no indication just yet about evasion for boosters or for vaccines, we're still waiting on that.

And that's the thing that's really important to highlight, is that scientists are still just watching this variant, and there's no set conclusion on it just yet. Just as a matter of background, it has been nicknamed the stealth variant because of its-- because of how hard it was to initially identify. And it kind of came out of nowhere seemingly.

So they're still studying the lineage of it to understand more details. But just so that we're all clear, omicron is still the problem. This is just another variant we're keeping an eye on right now. And again, going back to why this is all important, global vaccinations, local vaccinations, all of it plays a role in how this is going to continue to pan out here. Back to you.

BRAD SMITH: Yahoo Finance's own Anjalee Khemlani, thank you so much for those updates. Appreciate it, Anjalee.