Monday, September 19, 2022

I had to help clean up a bit of a mess today when the President casually said on a “60 Minutes” interview that the pandemic was over. I had a number of press today and certainly I got asked the question particularly on NPR about how this relates to the fact that all of us have been saying that we are still in the middle of a pandemic and 400 people are dying each day. I gave the explanation that it really is a matter of semantics and that the president was referring to the fact that the fulminant stage of the outbreak is no longer present since we were experiencing 800,000 cases a day and over 3000 deaths per day several months ago and the situation is very different now. However, I did emphasize that we are still in the middle of a pandemic. It is likely that there will be another wave of infections in November: Variant report 2022-09-14 A variant wave is likely to start in at most 3 months The BA.2.75 sublineage BA.2.75.2 (S:346T, S:486S, S:1119N) currently doubles in share every week (+80- 120%). It made up between 0.1 and 0.5% in samples from two weeks ago in Europe (in Asia, North America and Oceania, the share is higher at between 0.5-5%). • Global Cov-Spectrum query • Europe Cov-Spectrum query If this growth trend continues, this variant will dominate in about two months. At this point, the growth advantage would manifest in increased overall growth in incidence and a variant wave would start around November - on top of the expected seasonal acceleration of transmission. The growth advantage over resident BA.2 or BA.5 lineages is of the same order of magnitude as was the case when BA.5 displaced BA.2, which was sufficient to cause a summer wave. Currently, BA.2.75.2 is the fastest growing lineage with more than 350 sequences available. The rest of this report will focus on other lineages that may end up growing faster than BA.2.75. PRESS: Canada TV “The Agenda” with Steve Paikin; NPR “The World” with Marco Werman;Podcast with Steve Morrison at CSIS; MiddleEast Broadcast Interview (TV); Rural Health Matters TV with Dr. Jeffrey Gold;