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Dr Robin’s Covid-19 Updates
BA.2 Is Snapping at Our Heels
Will It Cripple Us Again?
We are still in the middle of a wonderful Covid lull but there’s probably some storm clouds gathering, mostly in the form of that Omicron variant called BA.2.
Numbers of cases, deaths and hospitalizations are going down in the US but skyrocketing in other parts of the world, including places like the UK which has super high numbers. This is worrisome because the UK is one of our “Prediction Countries” — they tend to have patterns in Month One (late March) that we usually follow pretty closely in Month Two (late April).
In addition, our wastewater situation is worrying — there’s a bunch of places in the US that are showing an increase in Covid particles in the wastewater, and that tends to be very predictive. If you see rising numbers of particles in the poop it’s pretty inevitable that a few weeks later you are going to see a rise in cases.
Even though testing and reporting is getting lousy (fewer places to test, more at-home tests), the fact is BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1 makes it probable that — as “good” as things are now — we may have some kind of a surge of cases in late April/May.
We can’t say exactly when, and what we really can’t say is how high and how long or in what parts of…
