Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
The world has built up a lot of immunity in the nine months since the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus became dominant, driving a record wave of infections.
That immunity from vaccines and past infection is helping to keep down hospitalizations and deaths even as Omicron’s offspring—a succession of subvariants—have become dominant, one after one.
Now the virus is trying to find a way around our antibodies. A new subvariant, BA.4.6, is beginning to outcompete its predecessor, BA.5. Its advantages include a particular mutation to the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it to grab onto and infect our cells.