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00:00Into the weekend Andrew even a dummy like me has figured out I'm a is not Delta but it's something. Well there's some mystery to it. What's the biggest mystery with Arma into this weekend. Really it circles around the issue of why this virus seems to be so much more transmissible. Certainly you know it has mutations that can invade some of the immune responses that vaccines give you. But it really does seem like this virus is spreading better than other variants for other reasons. And right now we don't really understand what that is. But certainly it seems like people are getting infected and unconditioned that previously were highly unlikely to mediate infection. And that's fueling this massive surge of cases. Transmission is something that's really difficult to study in a laboratory. But it really is one of the things that Omicron is doing fantastically better than any previous variant we've seen. Is there a row or a Zeta after omicron. I mean I frankly like the geography designations that we used to do in the old days. But do you just assume there's another variant after this one. There absolutely will be. This virus has already shown the ability to evolve change and respond to its new host humans. And it's now showing the ability to try to evade some of the immune responses that are coming down the line. I do firmly feel we're on a path to make this disease caused by this virus much more mild much more contained because we will have population immunity. We will have vaccines that are effectively knocking down severe disease and will eventually have antivirals that are distributed to help them limit that. So there are ways that we can control this disease. But this virus will be around for a long time and it's looking more and more like we're going to have to deal with this like we deal with seasonal influenza. Andy when do we get to that point where we have enough whether it's herd immunity or just immunity in the general population with also the remedies the antivirals and the vaccines where we can basically go back to life as it is basically treat this like the common cold or the flu. Well I really do feel like this surge of omicron cases is really going to be the tipping point because with the massive number of cases and let's be clear some of the official counts are probably underestimates of the true number of cases that are out there right now because of a number of reasons. But this surge of all Micron cases may be what really pushes us over that border to enough immunity in the population. So that transmission is limited and therefore you know the likelihood of getting infected will be a little bit lower going forward from here. How do people avoid getting sick. Well it really comes down to the basic principles we've been talking about perhaps boosted up a little bit. I'm a big believer now that people should be really thinking about wearing K and 95 masks or double masking with a surgical mask and a facial covering on top of that. I think that this increased transmission of all macron requires people to take an even greater effort to try to limit their exposures. And again masking as one thing the other social distancing issues that we've talked about are important to continue to do do as much work as you can remotely. But when you're going into situations where you gonna be exposed to people realize that you need to up your game in terms of the things you do to protect yourself and be wary of getting infected.

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Omicron Surge May Be Covid Tipping Point: Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Professor and Virologist Andrew Pekosz discusses the easy transmission of omicron and the next steps in the evolution of Covid-19. The Bloomberg School of Public Health is supported by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. (Source: Bloomberg)

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