A more contagious COVID variant could be the dominant strain in the U.S. within a month.
, after detecting a surge in infections that experts attribute to the new subvariant.
Surveillance of sewer systems—in essence, scooping up water samples and testing them for the virus—only hints at a possible increase in infections. And an increase in infections might not cause a commensurate increase in hospitalizations, deaths and long-term impacts on infected people. “The peak of the Omicron BA.2 wavelet when it arrives may well be significantly smaller than previous waves in terms of severe disease—hospitalizations and deaths—because a large fraction of the U.S. population has some degree of immunity, from vaccination, infection, including with Omicron BA1, or both,” Bortz said.
Most importantly, we have highly effective, safe and free vaccines. And they still work just fine, even as SARS-CoV-2 keeps mutating. “As with the BA.1 version, being fully vaccinated and boosted provides good protection against BA.2,” Prins said.