COVID-19: Two new omicron variants are spreading in N.Y. and elsewhere. Here's what we know
On Wednesday, health officials in New York said that two new omicron variants are spreading rapidly in the state. The variants appear to be causing a small surge in cases in central New York state, the department of health said.
Known as BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1, the variants are closely related to the BA.2 variant – a version of omicron that has caused surges across Europe and is now dominant across the U.S.
Together the two new variants now comprise 90% of cases in central New York.
But one of them, BA.2.12.1, contains a mutation that appears to give the variant an advantage, computational biologist Cornelius Roemer wrote on Twitter. The mutation resides on the part of the virus that binds to human cells. And in previous variants, this mutation has helped the virus infect cells, studies have found. The BA.2.12. variant appears to have a growth advantage of about 30% to 90% per week over BA.2, Roemer estimates. ...
I'd been noticing on the NY Times heat maps over the past week or so that patterns are starting to resembe other early outbreaks. Most activity is in urbanised or high-travel states after finally burning out in rural ones --- Idaho and Maine had been the last-remaining hot-spots of the Omicron wave. Now cases are rising in the Northeast, Washington, DC (notably the Gridiron gala), Colorado, and Illinois. The pattern once again is of emergence in specific spots, many either high-population or high-travel, and I expect to see spread outwards from those regions once again.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
No idea what the morbidity and mortality will be, though it's worth noting that the Omicron wave ended up showing a peak on 3 Feb 2022 comparable to the 27 Jan 2021 previous peak: 2,652 peak daily deaths as compared to 3,310. This was based on a far higher measured case count, though testing coverage may also have increased between the two waves.
If there's good news, this wave is emerging during Northern springtime, as people are increasingly outdoors and buildings are better ventilated, both of which tend to reduce spread. As summer emerges and people congregate inside air-conditioned structures, beginning in the Southeast, I expect severity may increase.
Watch Florida and Texas.
#covid19 #ba_2_12 #ba_2_12_1 #pandemic #epidemiology #sarscov2