Medicines agency says EU is seeing ‘new wave’ of COVID-19

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A senior official at the European Union medicines agency says that many nations in the bloc are seeing a new wave of COVID-19 driven by highly-transmissible mutations of the omicron variant. The European Medicines Agency’s Marco Cavaleri told an online briefing Thursday that the BA.4 and BA.5 mutations are expected to become dominant across the continent, “likely replacing all other variants by the end of July.” He said that while there is no evidence the variants make people more sick than earlier strains of the virus, “the increase in transmission among older age groups is starting to translate into severe disease.”