The BA.2 coronavirus variant — which is the omicron variant’s subvariant — has been spreading around the world, causing symptomatic illness for many infected people.
Details: The ZOE COVID-19 Study — which monitors case numbers for emerging COVID-19 trends in the United Kingdom — recently reported in a new data release that there are about 258,155 new daily symptomatic COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom on average.
- Per the study, about 1 in 24 people in the UK currently has a case of symptomatic COVID-19.
- “New cases are also rising across all the age groups, with worryingly high increases in the older, more vulnerable age groups,” the study said.
What they’re saying: “COVID cases are now at the highest levels the ZOE COVID Study has ever recorded,” said professor Tim Spector, the lead scientist on the study, in a statement.
- “We will need to wait a few weeks to see the full impact on increased hospitalization but numbers have already started to rise,” he added.
The bigger picture: COVID-19 cases are expected to rise in the United States because of the BA.2 coronavirus variant, as I reported for the Deseret News.
- In fact, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that COVID-19 cases likely from the BA.2 subvariant have been tripling every two weeks in the country, per ABC News.
What they’re saying: “I would expect that we might see an uptick in cases here in the United States because, only a week or so ago, the CDC came out with their modification of the metrics for what would be recommended for masking indoors, and much of the country right now is in that zone, where masking indoors is not required,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told KGTV last week.