Experts expect that Thanksgiving gatherings will stir up social networks and give new coronavirus subvariants fresh pockets of vulnerable people to infect.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen with the BQ variants. Many experts say they feel hopeful that we won't see the big waves of winters past -- certainly nothing like the original Omicron variant, with its jaw-dropping peak of nearly a million new daily infections.First, there's the experience of other countries like the UK, where BQ.1 has outcompeted its rivals to dominate transmission even as cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that's probably because BQ.1's advantages are incremental, not drastic. If there's reason to worry about BQ in the US, it could be this: Americans aren't as well-vaccinated or boosted as other countries. CDC data shows that two-thirds of the population has completed the primary series of the COVID-19 vaccines, and only 11% of those who are eligible have gotten an updated bivalent booster. In the UK, 89% of the population over age 12 has completed their primary series, and 70% have been boosted.
The number of previous cases in a country, the percentage of people who wore masks, average income and the percentage of the population older than 65 ran a distant second, third, fourth and fifth, respectively.
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