New York Area Bears the Brunt of Omicron on Top of Delta
What happens during the collision of two variants when the public’s reserve of trust and patience has been exhausted?
More on the way.
Photographer: Brad Barket/Getty Images
The change of expert opinion was sudden. Researchers at Harvard Medical School now say the omicron variant, not delta, is likely fueling the current surge in Covid-19 cases in the northeastern U.S. That’s cause for alarm, because they still don’t know much about the variant, and it’s unclear how well vaccines will protect people. Harvard’s labs are optimized for speed but omicron is spreading faster than they can track it.
“I think we are in the omicron surge,” Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said at a press event on Tuesday afternoon. “There’s no system on the planet that could keep up with the pace of this doubling time.”