Omicron now represents the majority of Covid-19 cases in the USA. Disease experts there anticipate a swift, punishing wave of infections this winter.
A person receives a COVID-19 test at a walk-up testing site in New York City on December 15, 2021.Omicron now represents 59% of Covid-19 cases in the USA, new data from its CDC says.
The overall trend is the same."We're still seeing steady increase in the proportion of Omicron," the spokesperson said. Omicron overtook Delta as the dominant coronavirus strain in the US in the week ending December 25, according to the new data, less than a month after the. By contrast, Delta became dominant in the US after roughly four months. Omicron cases are now doubling every two to three days and have spread to all 50 US states, according to the CDC.
The variant seems more transmissible than other strains, though scientists aren't exactly sure why. Disease experts say Omicron could be inherently better at spreading from person to person, or it may simply be better than other variants at infecting vaccinated people. "I may be perfectly protected against Delta, but the same dose of Omicron may be able to infect me because it gets around that immunity that was protecting me from Delta," Andy Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Insider."Conversely, maybe it does take only 10 infectious particles to start an infection with Omicron as opposed to 100 with Delta. We still don't know that information yet.
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