#16,415
Although Delta remains in firm control across the nation (96.8%), we are starting to see the first signs of Omicron's intrusion (in purple) in the CDC's Nowcast regional map (above) which was updated today. For the past few months Delta has been running at 99.9% of all cases in the country.
Nowcast
Nowcast is a model that estimates more recent proportions of circulating variants and enables timely public health action. CDC is providing weekly Nowcast estimates which will be updated every week on Tuesday.
Overall, the CDC estimates that 2.7% of new cases over the past 2 weeks in the United States are from Omicron (see chart below), but that number is much higher (13.1%) in the mid-Atlantic states.
While these are estimates, based on modeling, they should provide some early warning to local public health agencies. Although there are reports out of South Africa suggesting milder disease with Omicron, it is too soon to know if that will continue, or if it will translate to all other regions of the world.
It is currently summer in South Africa. They have a much younger population than Europe or the United States, and have seen 3 waves of COVID (including Beta, which did not spread globally), all of which could influence community immunity, transmission, and outcomes.
Or perhaps not. We'll have to wait and see. But it is far too soon to know.
If we see the kind of exponential growth with Omicron that they are seeing (and forecasting) in Europe, even a milder pandemic virus could overwhelm already heavily burdened healthcare delivery systems.
And that could mean that many people - even those without COVID - could find emergency and routine medical care less available in the weeks to come (see The Realities Of Crisis Standards Of Care).
While I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that Omicron is `less bad' than Delta, Paracelsus is credited with coining the famous maxim on toxicology, that `The dose makes the poison".
Which suggests that a virus that is (hopefully) 50% less severe than Delta, but infects 4-times more people, can still be quite formidable.
Stay tuned.
