be up if cases are declining? i don t get it. this is what we call the lag that hospitalizations and death generally have during a surge. the omicron surge superimposed upon our previous surge, it looks like a shooting arrow up and a rapid descent down. so normally, this curve gets widened and these hospitalizations kind of keep extending and unfortunately deaths as well. it can take from the diagnosis to death several weeks. that s why we re seeing numbers coming up, especially amongst unvaccinated and unboosted people with chronic conditions. i know it s early, but what can you tell us about this new stealth omicron variant? how worried should we be? yeah. well, i worry about any variant and then you add the word stealth to it. the stealth kind of name is a misnomer because we can pick up this variant ba.2. it s a sister to the omicron variant that is prevalent in the united states. it is picked up by p and rapid
month in our state. but it has chased delta out of town. it is less fatal. if you get vaccinated now and it can prevent serious disease that is a wonderful thing. we still don t have everybody vaccinated. i just cry about that fact. we lost an ex-trooper, a state senator, and people not vaccinated are still at risk. we are not done with that effort. that effort will continue after march 21st and we will keep our masks in hospitals and prisons and places where people are in congregate settings. there is more work to do. you are talking about omicron but we are monitoring this sub variant ba.2 which may cause more severe disease. how do you plan on handling future variants should they pop up? you may have to go back to that
evidence of that part and so on. yeah. you know, we re seeing the virus in places like the united kingdom and south africa and denmark and when you look at a real world data from those countries, where they ve seen a lot of ba.2 it does not look like the virus produces more severe illness or more icu admissions. one thing to remember is that variants are produced all the time. this variant is rising in the united states, most recent data shows that it is about 5% or 6% of the isolates in this country but not rising nearly as quickly as omicron did in january. so we ll have to see whether it can out compete omicron. there is some data that suggests that it might be a bit more immune evasive than omicron. but probably not a lot more.
washington was hit very hard early on. it is a very different situation now. how much of today s announcement is treating this like an endemic learning to live with it rather than a pandemic? well, i think that tone or tenor of how to think of it is accurate. we now understand it is not going to be zero and is going to be in our society for how many years to come and so thinking about it in those terms makes sense and also because we now have so many more tools to fight it. we have a life saving vaccine. it is almost universally available and hopefully for the 4 and 5-year-olds shortly. we know the masks work. we now have additional monoclonal antibodies in treatments. we have so many more tools than early. that together with the very significant change in this variant. to some degree it s horrible. we lost a thousand people last
symptoms can be mild. and then can worsen over the course of the next week or two. we ve known since the beginning of this pandemic that it takes about a week for folks to get sick enough to need to be hospitalized. and then about another week or so before we start to see m motality. if her conditions were mild and then dissipate, the queen is moving in the right direction. if her systems worsen, that s a different story. hopefully we won t see that. . i want to ask about this sub variant ba.2. 4% of americans are infected with this. i guess we expect it to grow because it is more contagious than omicron. could this mean another surge? i think the consensus is probably not. the three things to consider