Samples taken from municipal sewer systems provide a measure of how much viral material is being produced by all the sick people in a community. wastewater surveillance suggest this may be short-lived.” “But indicators from the new wave in Europe and U.S. COVID-19 hospitalizations down to 23,000 and approaching their pandemic low,” he wrote this week. “A lot of people who are worried this is the beginning of another surge, but given how much infection we’ve had, given how vaccinated we are, I think that’s going to be a pretty good backstop against uncontrolled spread here,” he told CNBC on Monday.Īmong the opposing camp is Eric Topol, a professor of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. Scott Gottlieb thinks there will be a bump in case numbers, but not a significant wave. “I don’t think it’s likely to result in a second wave of infection in the United States.”įormer Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. The new variant is “quite similar to BA.1,” he says. Nathanie Landau, a professor of microbiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, is sympathetic to this view. And the millions of people who were infected with the original Omicron strain have antibodies that protect against BA.2. In other words, the same factors that caused the downslope in BA.1 infections here could keep BA.2 at bay, too. Among the cited reasons: Our current COVID-19 vaccines are effective against the BA.2 variant, just like they were against BA.1. One voice counseling calm is New York Times science reporter Carl Zimmer, who recently noted that epidemiologists don’t believe that BA.2 will cause a massive wave of cases. The experts are divided as to what it all means. But an increasing proportion of those cases are BA.2 - up from 5 percent a month ago to 25 percent this week - and viral loads detected via wastewater are rising in some places. So what does that mean for the U.S.? Though European surges have been a reliable precursor to stateside waves throughout most of the pandemic, the tea leaves are more ambiguous this time. are up 82 percent over the last two weeks and hospitalizations are up 38 percent. As a result, instead of the clean bell-shaped rise-and-decline we experienced here, infection rates in Europe remained high, and now they’re climbing higher. Scarcely had the BA.1 numbers begun to fall when BA.2 cases started ramping up. “The skies seem finally to be clearing,” a French government spokesperson said last month.īut they weren’t. That’s why France re-opened its nightclubs, Austria decided not to enforce its strict vaccine mandate, and Italy announced an end to its coronavirus certificate program. This winter’s Omicron surge hit the continent hard, but once it peaked, most experts expected infection rates to quickly fall as the population picked up natural immunity. Like the U.S., it has been pummeled by wave after wave. until now, it’s difficult to draw conclusions about what their surges mean for America in the short term. In response, the Chinese authorities have re-imposed lockdown measures affecting more than 50 million people.īecause these countries have experienced the pandemic so differently from the U.S. In the last few weeks, the number of cases in China has surged from 300 a day to more than 3,000. China, which imposed strict, widespread lockdowns during the early days of the pandemic and has maintained a “ Zero COVID” strategy since, mostly avoided the waves that hit the U.S. It’s hitting parts of Asia particularly hard.
First detected in the Philippines in November, the variant spread widely in South Africa and India in December and has since become the dominant strain around the world. BA.2 is also thought to infect vaccinated people more easily than its forebear, though, fortunately, it does not appear to be any deadlier.
These disparities are likely part of the reason BA.2 appears to be considerably more transmissible than the original Omicron - 33 percent, according to one Danish study. But it has 20 different mutations, four of them on a crucial region of the spike protein. Omicron BA.2 is similar to the variant that caused this winter’s spike, BA.1. But with another Omicron variant pushing up case numbers around the world, it seems depressingly plausible that at least one more wave - the sixth, if you’re counting - could be headed America’s way.
have been plummeting for weeks, and hospitalizations are near an all-time low. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photo: Dave Pedley/Getty Images for SXSWĬOVID is like Michael Myers in Halloween: Just when you think it’s finally out of the picture, it comes back to threaten you again.
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