Details: In South Africa and in the U.K., which experienced their Omicron waves before the U.S., cases spiked dramatically and then fell almost as quickly.
- That appears to be happening now in parts of the U.S. that got hit with the variant early, including Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.
What’s next: Even though Omicron seems to cause milder illness than prior variants, it has still strained hospitals’ resources, and the virus has continued to kill more than 1,000 people per day, on average.
- The U.S. surpassed 850,000 total COVID deaths according to data released over the weekend, just one month after recording 800,000 deaths related to the virus.
- “Unfortunately, the ‘loss of life peak’ is still ahead of us and we’re probably going to see that in the next week, or two,” Beyrer said.
Yes, but: The U.S. does seem to be largely tracking with the projections from South Africa with this variant, Bob Wachter, chairman of the University of California, San Francisco Department of Medicine, told Axios.
https://www.axios.com/omicron-covid-cases-down-4192efd7-1e28-47d3-ac25-37663b1fccdb.html