more than 1,700 in that country. the rising cases abroad has the attention of american health experts who are asking if covid statistics overseas may offer a preview of what is to come for the united states. throughout this pandemic, we have followed the united kingdom and western europe by about three weeks. so what happens there typically happens here. reporter: dr. jonathan reiner interprets covid upticks elsewhere as a clear sign that the virus is coming back. what they are seeing is not a sort of resurgence of the original ba1 omicron variant. what they are seeing is a second peak now of ba2, the more transmissible variant. and that is now slowly starting to rise in the united states. and i expect that we will see a pretty definitive evidence of an increase in cases in the united states probably by the end of this month. reporter: other health experts caution the u.s. may not be as prepared for a potential ba2 variant surge. in the uk, 86% of eligible
well, good to be with you, paula. the ba2 is a sister of the original ba1 omicron. it has a lot of different mutations by the good thing is that vaccines with a booster are just as protective against it as the original strain or ba1. the problem is that it s about 40% more contagious. so even though it doesn t cause severe more severe illness, it s going to get to a lot more people as we re seeing in a lot of countries in western europe. now, if you ve already had omicron, can you still get this subvariant? that s right. uh, there s some antibody response to the omicron ba1 that crossreacts to this ba2 but it s not great. it is a relatively weak antibody response, so yes, there can be infections that come, you know, after ba1 with this second lineage of the omicron. so given that, we could see