Omicron’s “invisible” variant has made headlines around the world in recent weeks as many fear another Covid surge may be around the corner. Experts assure Americans that things may not be as bad as some think.
Dr. Jacob Lemieux, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said on Tuesday that he does not believe there will be a large spike in Covid cases in the US similar to what has happened in Hong Kong and some European countries in recent weeks.
Instead, he predicts cases will rise slightly but still remain at the extremely low overall level currently seen in the country.
Meanwhile abroad, the World Health Organization (WHO) is still issuing dire warnings about the consequences that the stealth option could have, especially as pandemic-related masking and distancing mandates are being lifted. The organization reported on Tuesday that global infections increased by seven percent last week.
BA.2, the stealth variant’s official name, is an Omicron bloodline that has spread across much of the world but has had little impact in the US.
However, he failed to gain a foothold in the US, as in much of Europe.
Dr. Jacob Lemieux (pictured), a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, does not believe the US will experience the same Covid surge caused by BA.2 as many other countries in the world earlier this month.
BA.2 accounts for 35 percent of active Covid cases in the US, with BA.1 still dominating, according to the latest data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week.
However, BA.2’s share of Covid infections in America is on the rise, with the variant accounting for just 23 percent of cases in the previous week.
“We see almost nothing related to the transition to BA.2 prevalence,” Lemieux told The Harvard Gazette.
Covid cases remain stable despite what is happening elsewhere in the world.
America averages 31,309 cases per day, the same as last week. This is the lowest average weekly incidence since July 2021, just before the Delta variant spike.
America is also suffering from 1,032 deaths a day from the virus, a 13 percent decrease from the last seven days. Deaths from the virus have dropped significantly over the past few months due to the milder nature of the Omicron variant and the country’s successful rollout of the vaccine, with nearly 90 percent of adults receiving at least one shot.
Internationally, the WHO reports that more than 12 million cases of Covid were reported worldwide last week, up seven percent from the previous week.
However, the death toll dropped by 23 percent to less than 33,000 – another sign of the virus’s decline in deaths.
The rise in cases has been entirely concentrated in the Western Pacific region, where daily infections jumped 23 percent last week. In Europe, the number of infections has stabilized after a slight increase of two percent last week.
In some countries where the number of cases has been declining for several months, such as the UK, France and Denmark, infection rates suddenly started to rise last week. Apparently, the incidence in these countries has also stabilized, and the increase has stopped.
Harvard experts are hoping that since there hasn’t been a BA.2 surge in the US so far, that means it most likely never will.
Since this variant already accounts for more than a third of cases nationwide, they believe it would have affected national and local incidence rates by now.
“In fact, there is no evidence of an increase in cases or deaths in the region that is consistent with the increase in BA.2 infections we are seeing,” said Bronwyn McInnis, director of genomic pathogen surveillance at Harvard’s Broad Institute.
On the West Coast, Dr. Pavitra Roychaudhuri, a bioinformatics expert at the University of Washington, told that the increase in BA.2 prevalence in her department’s sequencing has not yet resulted in an increase in cases.
However, in some places, the number of cases is rising, suggesting that BA.2 may be starting to affect daily incidence rates across the country.
According to the CDC, BA.2 is most prevalent in the New York and New Jersey regions, accounting for 52 percent of cases.
New York, which has so far served as a kind of canary in the coal mine during the pandemic, has recorded a 14 percent rise in Covid infections over the past two weeks, becoming the first state to record a significant jump in nearly two months. .
Manhattan, New York’s largest population center, also recorded a 17 percent increase over the past week, fueling an even bigger population surge across the state.
However, the state is still at 1,000 cases per day, which is a very small number that pales in comparison to the nearly 40,000 cases per day mark reached at the peak of the Omicron variant.
Other states that have recorded gains in the last two weeks include Arkansas (up 34 percent in two weeks), Nevada (23 percent), Colorado (22 percent), Vermont (seven percent) and Rhode Island (one percent).
The WHO warns that the rise in infections is just the beginning of what could be a harsh spring season for some parts of the world.
“This increase comes despite reduced testing in some countries, which means the cases we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week.
