The emergence of the latest COVID-19 variant, which makes up nearly 80 percent of new cases nationally, is raising additional health concerns due to its ability to infect people even if they are vaccinated or have had a prior infection, and health officials are increasingly recommending precautions such as masking indoors and staying up to date on booster shots.

But those concerns are not likely to sway South Dakota government, health care and school officials to move away from an official stance of “living with the virus” rather than pursuing active interventions this fall.

The BA.5 variant, first detected in the United States at the end of April, is a subvariant of Omicron with molecular spike mutations that make it more contagious than previous variants. This means high case counts are likely, but that might not necessarily mean a drastic spike in hospitalizations and deaths because vaccines and other forms of immunity, while not impenetrable, can still blunt the impact of infection.

“The good news is that the virus is evolving the way that we expect viruses to evolve,” said Dr. Jeremy Cauwels, chief physician at Sanford Health in Sioux Falls. “They get better at spreading and they get worse at killing their host.”

See full story in this week’s Leader-Courier.