Omicron Variant Quotes

During COVID, one challenge with conventional contact tracing is that it’s not an especially efficient use of resources, because the virus is not transmitted at the same rate by everyone who’s infected. If you get the original COVID strain, the chances are not especially high that you’ll pass it along to someone else. (About 70 percent of those cases may not transmit to anyone else at all.) But if you do pass it along to someone else, you probably pass it along to many people. For reasons we don’t entirely understand, 80 percent of COVID infections with early variants came from just 10 percent of the cases. (These numbers could be different for the Omicron variant—as I write this, we don’t have enough data to know.) So with a virus like COVID, using the conventional approach means you’ll spend a lot of time finding people who wouldn’t have infected anyone else—epidemiologically speaking, you’ll find yourself in a lot of cul-de-sacs. What you really want to do is find the main thoroughfares, the relatively small number of people who are causing the most infections.

BA2 and BA3 the latest Omicron variants to hit the streets. We shouldn't panic yet, but it appears that they are more transmissible than the original Omicron virus. Time will tell what we are looking at, but deaths are still happening at a slower rate so we all need to be careful. We still need to wear masks and be responsible for looking after family, friends, loved ones and strangers because if we let our guard down, then it will get out of control once more.

recent research found that individuals who had been reinfected with COVID-19 had a larger risk of hospitalization and death than those who had only been infected once. They were also more prone to develop new and persistent health concerns, including lung and heart problems, weariness, gastrointestinal and kidney disorders, diabetes, and cognitive anomalies.

Early in the pandemic, there was a broad belief in the scientific community that, although there would be some mutations of COVID, they wouldn’t cause a big problem. By early 2021, scientists knew that variants were emerging, but they appeared to be evolving in similar ways, leading some scientists to hope that the world had already seen the worst mutations that the virus was capable of. But the Delta variant proved otherwise—its genome had evolved to make it far more transmissible. The arrival of Delta was a bad surprise, but it convinced everyone that even more variants could show up. As I finish this book, the world is facing a sweeping wave of Omicron, the fastest-spreading variant to date—and in fact the fastest-spreading virus we’ve ever seen.