Scientists knew when the Omicron variant first appeared in South Africa that it would be different from the other coronaviruses.
They didn't know much more about its transmissibility, severity, ability to dodge our immune defenses or what kind of new havoc it might wreak as a result.
They kept repeating the same thing.
The members of the Ohio National Guard are going to give the COVID-19 tests. Matthew Hatcher is a photographer.
After nearly two months of lab studies and real-world observations, those same experts have a better idea of what Omicron is capable of.
Some of the news is positive. Some is not.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, told Yahoo News that Omicron is the most transmissible variant. It is likely that Omicron will be milder as a result of being in January 2022, having so much more immunity in the world.
It adds up to a virus that is less dangerous to each person who catches it, but that will still find vulnerable, strain the hospital system and upend work, school and commerce because so many more people are catching and spreading it than ever before.
The US has already reported more than a million new cases in a single day. More Americans will be hospitalized with COVID by mid-January if admissions continue at their current pace.
We have learned a lot about Omicron in the last few days, so we have put together a cheat sheet for readers who might have checked it out over the holidays.
Delta is more severe than Omicron.
A patient is in the intensive care unit at a Massachusetts hospital. Joseph Prezioso is a photographer.
The hope was that reports of milder symptoms and quicker recoveries would trickle out of South African hospitals. It has been confirmed.
In the first month of the fourth wave in South Africa, only about 5 percent of cases were admitted to the hospital, according to a preprint study. The percentage of admissions for severe disease was down from before.
The study found that patients admitted to the hospital during the Omicron surge were 73 percent less likely to have severe disease than patients admitted during the Delta surge.
The second study, published by the Health Security Agency in the U.K., found that people who had contracted Omicron were less likely to need hospital care than those who had been exposed to Delta. According to Dr. Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Translational Institute and a leading COVID expert, that means a reduction in Omicron clinical severity vs. Delta.
The pattern is being played out in real life. John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist for the Financial Times, said the number of patients on ventilators has barely risen despite steep rises in cases. The number of people in London intensive care units has fallen in recent weeks, and is not following the same path as last winter.
A new report found that less than 15 percent of early Omicron patients in the Houston Methodist health care system had to be hospitalized, compared with 43 percent of the system's early Delta patients and 55 percent of its early Alpha patients.
Burn-Murdoch said that the link between cases and disease has weakened with Omicron.
Why is Omicron less severe? It is worse at infecting the lungs.
A woman is being tested at a pop-up site. Clary via Getty Images
It is clear that Omicron is less likely than Delta to make people who test positive really sick, but it is not clear how much of this is because more people now have some degree of immunity.
Experts say that immunity is playing a part. They think Omicron is too.
Seven different studies have shown the same thing: decreased lung-cell "infectionivity" for Omicron.
The new variant doesn't grow in the lungs as easily as older ones, possibly because it's harder for a specialProtein on the surface of lung cells to latch onto it. One study found that Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the other variant.
The lungs are where COVID can become a life-threatening illness.
Preliminary research shows that Omicron might grow faster in the upper respiratory system than Delta or the original coronaviruses.
This has led some scientists to think that Omicron has evolved into an upper-airway specialist, thriving in the throat and nose in order to increase its chances of getting expelled into the air and infecting new hosts.
It is all about what happens in the upper airway. Gupta told the New York Times. The severe disease stuff happens down below in the lungs. The virus has evolved in this way.
Even if they are less effective against infections and transmission, vaccines still work well to prevent disease.
Adia Foster is in Las Vegas. The images are byEthan Miller.
Omicron is very skilled at sidestepping our immune system's first line of defense and causing infections. This is true regardless of whether you had a previous infection, one shot of Johnson & Johnson or two shots of an mRNA vaccine such as Moderna or Pfizer. Two mRNA doses are not as effective as they used to be at preventing Omicron infections.
Reports from both South Africa and the U.K. suggest that boosters are 70 percent effective at first.
Israel is already administering fourth doses to seniors, health workers and patients because of the protection that will likely wear off.
The strong protection the existing vaccines give against severe disease is less likely to fade.
The vaccines are still effective against hospitalization even without a third shot. The protection increases to 88 percent with a booster.
Why? In a Wednesday Substack post, Topol explained that our backup immune defenses, T cells and B cells, are amazing at recognizing and fighting Omicron after it causes an infection but before it can cause severe disease.
In the past week alone, six new studies have come out showing that T cell function can be preserved for up to 8 months after a vaccine.
The latest research shows that a third booster shot causes our memory B cells to adapt to Omicron, which is a subset of the cells that remember the virus.
Real-world data shows how protective vaccinations can be. 75 percent of the patients in the intensive care unit at the University of Maryland were unvaccinated over the last month. Twenty-two percent of them were given two vaccine doses, and many of them were immunocompromised or had previously been shot.
3 percent was boosted.
It is worth pausing to appreciate how amazing this is.
The good news is that Omicron is causing a lot of cases.
People line up for testing in the Bronx.
Omicron would have a harder time spreading if everyone were boosted. Only 22 percent of Americans have received a third jab, and 40 percent of the world's population hasn't gotten their first.
Case counts that were unthinkable just a few weeks ago have been achieved.
Omicron accounted for just 8 percent of cases in the U.S. on December 11. By Christmas, the number had doubled to 77 percent, and it had skyrocketed to 38 percent. Almost all of the U.S. cases are Omicron, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It took Delta four months to clear the 50 percent threshold.
Omicron was described by a Spanish physician and medical historian as the most-explosive and fastest-spreading virus in history. William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, said that it was the most rapidly spreading virus among the ones he had been able to investigate.
The latest numbers from the U.S. and other places show that. The most new U.S. cases in a single day were 300,777 on January 8, 2021. The US recorded more than one million on Monday.
The highest seven-day average in America was 251,232. It shows no sign of slowing down.
In April 2021, the daily case count cleared 900,000. It was never close to the 1 million mark.
The number of global cases from January 4? More than 2 million.
The sheer volume of Omicron infections is causing huge problems in hospitals, schools and elsewhere.
Outside of St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, Calif. The person is Mike Blake.
Over the last two weeks, the number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has risen by 51 percent.
The peak of hospitalizations during the recent Delta wave was about 105,000 COVID patients. During the spring and summer of 2020, there were no more than 75,000 Americans hospitalized with COVID.
The peak for U.S. COVID hospitalizations was on January 14, 2021. We are likely to set a new U.S. hospitalization record about a week from now. The number of COVID hospitalizations in the U.S. will probably keep increasing because of the lag between cases and admissions.
In the last two weeks, hospitalizations in New York and Florida have increased at much faster rates than in places where Omicron has yet to take off. More people are hospitalized with COVID in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut than during last winter's peak.
The current wave of Omicron hospitalizations is different from previous waves, with a lower percentage of patients on a breathing machine or in the intensive care unit, and a higher percentage who arrive because of other ailments but test positive for COVID upon screening.
That is encouraging.
Since Halloween, the number of Americans dying of carbon dioxide has not changed. The system is stretching to its breaking point because of the huge influx of patients arriving at the hospital either for COVID or with COVID.
541 counties are at high risk of hitting hospital capacity within the next 10 days, up from 456 the previous day. An estimated 80 percent of the US population now lives in counties that have exceeded their hospital capacity.
Doctors are using social media to explain why this is a problem.
At a time when our ERs are already seeing high numbers of non-COVID patients, record-number COVID cases are hitting. The COVID patients are not as sick. Craig Spencer is an emergency physician in New York. There were some short breaths and need for oxygen. COVID seemed to undermine a delicate balance of an underlying illness. It is making people sick in a different way.
Diabetes in which COVID precipitated is a serious and life-threatening condition. Older people are too weak to get out of bed. Can't walk. Can't leave the hospital. Patients who have done everything to avoid the virus are often in the same bed as the COVID cases. The cancer patient is receiving treatment. Those who have been affected by something else.
The next few weeks will be very difficult for us. A lot of health care workers will get sick. We will have to take on more patients. I am aware that you are tired of this. We are also. We need everyone's help to get through it again.
In the U.K., Omicron was associated last week with the absence of 68,000 healthcare professionals, representing 5% of the workforce.
Thousands of schools are delaying opening or going remote because so many teachers and students are testing positive, as well as firefighters, police, airlines and other businesses.
It is important to note that an individual case of Omicron is less likely to cause harm to that individual. In a society where nearly everyone still agrees that isolating people who are more vulnerable is the best way to prevent the spread of the disease, adding another million cases each day to the national burden is bound to have some very disruptive effects.
The emergency phase of the U.S. Pandemic could be over soon, thanks to Omicron.
Being free of masks is enjoyable. The images are from.
Omicron's speed is a big problem. Soon it might be a good thing.
The Omicron wave peaked one month after it started in South Africa.
That is very fast. South Africa had a Delta wave that lasted twice as long.
The first two global hubs to get slammed by Omicron may be New York City and London.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that new cases in London have been slowing down. In December, admissions were growing by as much as 15 percent a day, but they dropped to 5 percent increases over the New Year's weekend and are now growing at just 1 and 2 percent.
The number of cases reported in Manhattan on January 3 was 5,344, which was slightly lower than the number reported a week earlier on December 27.
The holiday reporting delays may be depressing. It seems likely that the Omicron peak will come quicker than other versions, and then plummet more steeply.
A new laboratory study carried out by South African scientists has shown that the antibodies produced after an Omicron infection are more effective against Delta than they are against Omicron.
Alex Sigal told the New York Times that Omicron is likely to push Delta out. We are looking at something we can live with more easily and that will disrupt us less than the previous versions.
Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, recently predicted that by early February, we could be in a place where COVID is, in fact, like the flu.
Wachter said that at that point, he might no longer be a sign of exhaustion, confusion, or political affiliation, but rather a perfectly rational and evidence-based way of approaching COVID, and life. I hope so.
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How are vaccine rates affecting the surge? This explainer is from Yahoo Immersive.
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