On Saturday, January 8, 2022, a resident received the Covid-19 swab test during a mobile clinic at St. Paul MB Church in Cleveland, Mississippi.
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According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the more contagious Omicron BA.2 subverter now makes up 72% of genetically sequenced covid infections in the United States.
BA.2 became influential in the United States last week, and now omicron is appearing on the track to replace the previous version of BA.1. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the Washington State Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, estimates that BA.2 will overtake BA.1 in the next week or two. Although the estimated range, BA.2 spreads 30% to 80% faster than BA.1, according to data from public health authorities in the United Kingdom and Denmark.
Maria Van Kerkhov, a top official at the World Health Organization, described BA.2 as the most contagious version of the virus to date. BA.2 has re-emerged in major European countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany. White House Chief Medical Adviser. Anthony Fawcett says infections in the United States could increase, although he doesn’t expect another big wave. Mokdad said infections in the United States are likely to decline for a week or two and then continue until winter.
In the United States, new infections and hospital admissions have dropped by more than 90% since the peak of the Omicron wave in January. As of Monday, the average number of people hospitalized with covid in the United States was 11,000, the lowest level since 2020, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. According to Johns Hopkins University, a seven-day average of about 28,000 new infections were reported in the United States on Sunday, the lowest level since July.
BA.2 does not generally make people sicker than previous versions of Omicron, and according to research in South Africa and Qatar, vaccines have the same level of effectiveness as BA.1. However, Omicron is generally adept at avoiding the protective antibodies produced by vaccines and causing groundbreaking infections that usually cause mild illness.