BA5 sub-variant can re-infect you with COVID within weeks.

Two new COVID sub-variants are sparking global concern.

This new Ninja COVID variant is the most dangerous one yet,

and the BA5 sub-variant is fueling another COVID wave

are all headlines that are at the top of search results related to COVID-19,

as of the day I'm recording this.

The original alpha variant of COVID,

the one that spread globally beginning in early 2020, was already bad, especially since most

of the world, didn't have any antibodies that could fight it, and we didn't have vaccines or

treatments to help us slow or deal with infections. The Delta variant was the first big breakout mutation of COVID,

and it was more infectious, but also far more dangerous and deadly than alpha. It hit those who caught it

in more debilitating ways and seemed to be more likely to trigger long-term, so-called long-COVID

symptoms that lasted for weeks or months, or even years after

the initial infection as well.

Omicron hit much of the world in late 2021 and early 2022, surging outward from South Africa,

where it was first detected and described, before rapidly and overwhelmingly infecting huge swaths

of the global population.

Previous waves were put to shame as Amicron was moderately less deadly because it tended

to set up shop higher in victims' airways rather than deep in the lungs, like Delta.

But that location, alongside other mutations,

also made it vastly more transmissible, setting all sorts of new infection records, and wiping

the floor with many of the barriers, vaccine-related and societal, we'd managed to put into

...