They have reinstated the smafk mandate, she says cases have risen 50% in ten days and if we fail to act now knowing every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and then a wave of deaths, it will be too late. completely disagree with her. she is sending the wrong message. let s look at the numbers. early january, over 6,000 cases in philadelphia county. yesterday, 330 cases. gillian, and 0 deaths. hospitalizations at an all time low in philadelphia. ticked up 100 cases and she s sounding the alarms. you know what that does, it causes more covid fatigue and it s milder. i said we have treatments. so a slight uptick in cases in an area where there is plenty of immunity around. a lot of vaccination in philadelphia, and a lot of people have had omicron ba1, now sounding alarm over ba2, that s the wrong answer. gillian: there are siegel, thank you as always.
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