[dirk digler]

Hadn't been paying much attention to Omicron until the last couple of days. Just hope the vaccines\boosters prevent major illness and death which early reports sound like it might.

The change of expert opinion was sudden. Researchers at Harvard Medical School now say the omicron variant, not delta, is likely fueling the current surge in Covid-19 cases in the northeastern U.S. That’s cause for alarm, because they still don’t know much about the variant, and it’s unclear how well vaccines will protect people. Harvard’s labs are optimized for speed but omicron is spreading faster than they can track it.

“I think we are in the omicron surge,” Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said at a press event on Tuesday afternoon. “There’s no system on the planet that could keep up with the pace of this doubling time.”

Though the Centers for Disease Control had reported just a few days earlier that omicron probably made up just 3% of U.S. infections, she said that’s probably a big underestimate as cases grow by the day. In New York and New Jersey, the percentage that are from omicron was estimated at 13% as of Wednesday.

“We know it’s the most transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2 we’ve ever seen before, and the most immune-evasive variant of SARS-CoV0-2,” said Jake Lemieux, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital who is also involved in tracking variants.

Omicron appears to be doubling around every four days. “It’s spread around the globe in under two weeks,” Lemieux said. “It’s a likelihood it will come to your holiday gathering.”