Just when you were beginning to believe the coronavirus pandemic might be behind us, here comes the all-new COVID BA.2 variant.
Top News Today
Nicknamed “Deltacron” (because it combines characteristics of the Delta and Omicron variants), COVID BA.2 is the latest coronavirus strain that’s been swiftly making its way across the US and several countries around the world. In fact, data released just last week shows that the new variant is spreading most rapidly in the Northeast and Western US.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID BA.2 cases have doubled each week over the past month — which means it is on its way to becoming the most dominant coronavirus strain to date.
In comparison, BA.1 is the sneaky variant that caught everyone by surprise during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and left most people sick with COVID. Now, consider this new variant as BA.1 times TWO and that should give a good idea of what to expect.
In the US, the CDC says COVID BA.2 accounted for about 23.1% of coronavirus cases for the week ending March 12th. It also made up 39% of cases in New Jersey and New York during the same period. In the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont), BA.2 accounted for 38.6% of cases. In the West (which includes Arizona, California, and Nevada), BA.2 accounted for 27.7% of cases, while in the upper West (including Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington), BA.2 made up 26.2% of cases.
Globally, data compiled by Johns Hopkins has discovered that the United Kingdom reported 93,943 new COVID cases last Wednesday, more than double the 45,303 recorded 2 weeks earlier. Last Friday, Germany recorded more than 250,000 new cases, while Hong Kong logged 900 cases per 100,000 residents in early March (its worst COVID outbreak of the pandemic this month).
Noted epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci is warning Americans to prepare themselves for the “possibility” of yet another lockdown. In fact, the reality is that COVID is permanently here to stay and we may never go back to the world we once knew in 2019. What’s more likely is that we will regularly go in and out of “safety” months (where masking and other precautions are loosely followed) and “danger” months (where the general public would have to be ultra-careful and potentially shut down temporarily until things are improved).
“What we’re seeing in Europe, and particularly in the U.K., is something we really need to pay attention to because they are starting to see a reversal and a resurgence of cases.”
– Dr. Anthony Fauci
Other prominent medical professionals have also joined the chorus of warnings.
“You just got over a wave of the most transmissible #SARSCoV2 variant the world has seen, with the highest level of hospitalizations in the pandemic,” Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said Thursday. “Now you are facing a variant [with] 30% more transmissibility, [without] mitigation measures, low [vaccination] coverage, and gutting funding.”
Even CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky cautioned that she too anticipates an increase in new virus cases in the US as Deltacron spreads, saying that it is “certainly … possible” for masking, social distancing, vaccine passport checks, and even shutdowns to be reimplemented.
However, a prominent British doctor is warning that people may riot in the streets if another lockdown is enforced.
“Locking down people again, I don’t think people would tolerate it again,” said Professor Roger Kirby, president of the Royal Society of Medicine in the United Kingdom. “There would be riots like there were in Belgium if they tried to do that.”
Still, he cautioned: “We are not out of the pandemic yet and must not risk becoming complacent.”
Or, in other words, we may have all grown tired of COVID, but COVID has not grown tired of us!
OK WASSUP! discusses the Top News Today:
COVID BA.2 is on the rise!
My boss at work was talking about this. He was saying Covid is like 911 when everything changed and we never went back to the old way of doing things. He made a good point because Covid is never going to be over. Like DJ was saying we are probably going to have to wear a mask and be careful from now on. The bad part is a lot of people are still thinking it is going to end one day and we can go back to how we use to do things but that is not happening. I think we still have a long way to go to figure out how we can live our life with Covid forever.