Peninsula Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry acknowledges while the BA.5 coronavirus sub-variant has become the dominant strain and is causing a spike in new cases, it is not the worst variant ever. During her coronavirus briefing with Jefferson County Commissioners this week she suggested caution be exercised when hearing reports about the severity of the variants.

BERRY:  “There’s unfortunately a tendency to try to kind of raise everybody’s blood pressure because it makes you quick. But right now we don’t have any variants circulating that strike me as the worst variant ever. The worst variant we’ve seen so far for COVID was the Gamma variant, which thankfully did not take hold the way the Delta variant did. But right now what we’re seeing is a highly transmissible that can get around prior immunity, but we’re not seeing severe disease.

And really what we would worry about as a public health community would be the combination of all three of those: transmissible, immunity and severity. That would make me very nervous and we’re not seeing that yet.”   

However she says the BA.5 variant is the most transmissible that’s been seen so far and is truly airborne at this point. That means that distancing doesn’t help that much. But she says the disease is not more severe for those who are fully vaccinated and boosted but can be quite severe for those who are unvaccinated and for those over 65 who don’t have all four vaccinations.