Global COVID monitoring is crashing as BA.2.86 variant raises alarm
Enlarge / WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI) With global attention and anxiety locked onto the latest coronavirus omicron subvariant BA.2.86, health officials and experts are still mostly in the dark about how the highly mutated virus will play out. At the start of the week, amid a flurry of headlines, researchers had only six genetic sequences of the virus in the public repository GISAID, even though the virus had already spread to at least four