It is a struggle between the variants of the coronavirus.
According to a study carried out by the University of Insubria, the Cerberus and Centaurus variants can compete with each other and thus cause new waves in the coming months.
The analysis, published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, compared the two variants with Omicron 5 (Ba.5) and demonstrated that Centaurus (Ba.2.75) is still the variant with the highest ability to bind to our cells (a good 57 times more than Omicron 5) and therefore the one with the highest diffusivity potential.
But “Centaurus shows a greater adhesiveness of binding to cells, Cerberus seems to show a greater ability to escape the antibodies produced by our body – explained Fabio Angeli, professor of diseases of the cardiovascular system at Insubria and research coordinator – and this does not excludes that in the next few months we could see a sort of competition between variants in trying to become dominant”. Given that Cerberus has the ability to bind cells not unlike those of Omicron, it is reasonable to hypothesize that new waves may be caused by the simultaneous and synergistic diffusion of different variants.
The researchers are therefore still pushing on the vaccination campaign which “remains crucial with bivalent vaccines, specifically built against the new variants” and in returning to using masks if there is an increase in infections.
