The omicron variant is driving U.S. COVID-19 case counts higher in many places just in time for the holiday season.
Carey Johnson and her son Fabian Swain are photographed wearing face masks in their Germantown, Md., home on Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Both Carey and Fabian have recovered from COVID.
“It’s been quite a while since we needed to have COVID wards," he said. “It’s making a clear comeback.” Carey Johnson’s family got hit twice. She came down with COVID-19 in January during the first omicron wave, suffering flu-like symptoms and terrible pain that kept her down for a week. Her son Fabian Swain, 16, suffered much milder symptoms in September when the BA.5 variant was dominant.“I was like, ‘I cannot get it together.’ I could not get my thoughts together. I couldn’t get my energy together” said Johnson, 42, of Germantown, Maryland. “And it went on for months like that.
Looking to the future, experts see the seeds of a widespread U.S. wave. They point to what's happening internationally — a BA.5 surge in Japan, a combination of variants pushing up cases in South Korea,Some experts said a U.S. wave could begin during the holidays as people gather indoors. Trevor Bedford, a biologist and genetics expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said it could peak at around 150,000 new cases a day, about what the nation saw in July.
Omicron thrived. Mara Aspinall, who teaches biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University, noted that the first omicron strain represented 7.5% of circulating variants by mid-December and 80% just two weeks later. U.S. cases at one point soared to a million a day. Omicron generally caused less severe disease than previous variants, but hospitalizations and deaths shot up given the sheer numbers of infected people.
"There’s much more pressure for the virus to diversify,” said Shishi Luo, head of infectious diseases for Helix, a company that supplies viral sequencing information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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