It seems everyone keeps trying to tell us the terribly contagious virus and pandemic known as COVID-19 is moving into our rearview mirror.
We hope so, but we must wonder if perhaps all those mirrors are simply fogged with wishful thinking. The more our various officials assert COVID is waning, subsiding or peaking, the higher the cases and death counts mount. Not to mention the new “stealth” Omicron subvariant now spreading and worrying experts, according to National Geographic.com.
Hamilton County health officials, who just a few weeks ago said the omicron wave was peaking Thursday said our weekly average for new cases was at its highest point ever, with the county averaging 734 new reported illnesses a day. What’s more, that’s an undercount, those same officials acknowledged, due to the rise in at-home tests.
Meanwhile, deaths added up, too, as Hamilton County reached a milestone with 1,007 deaths as of last Thursday, and that number rose again over the weeked to 1,016.
And as U.S. deaths climbed above 906,000, National Geographic wrote that the new stealth variant of omicron appears to have even higher transmission potential, and possibly a greater ability to evade the immune response, than the original omicron, “leading experts to fear it could further prolong the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In the U.S., more than 2,600 people died from COVID-19 every day last week, a rate that’s 30% higher than it had been two weeks before. And did we mention that the U.S. has a far higher COVID death rate than other wealthy countries?
Already the new variant, officially known as BA.2, has caused about 250 cases in the United States and been identified in more than half the states, according to National Geographic. It’s called stealth because it is missing key mutations in its spike protein that are necessary for rapid tests to distinguish it from previous variants, such as delta. This difference also may be why BA.2, which experts think is a sibling of the original omicron rather than a descendent, escaped attention earlier.
Still, BA.2 is “just as detectable by PCR as any other variant,” an expert told the magazine.
What remains unsettled is whether the stealth version is equally or even more adept at evading immune protection provided by vaccines.
Is it time to see COVID as a rear-view mirror thing? Hardly.