The BA.2 omicron subvariant is expected to make up most of Chicago’s COVID cases by the end of the month, the city’s top doctor said Tuesday.
Arwady highlighted that in some states along the East Coast, BA.2 is representing an even larger portion of cases.Chicago's COVID metrics saw slight increases over the last week.
"At this point, we've not seeing major signs like we're seeing in Europe, but while we continue to watch, we'll have a better sense of this honestly, probably by the end of the month when BA.2 will be predominant here," she said. "We are very much seeing large surges of COVID in much of Europe," Arwady said, adding that"parts of this world right now look like Chicago did in early January in terms of numbers of cases."
"I'm not expecting a big surge here, but we're gonna have to pay close attention and really be driven by data as we have throughout the whole pandemic," White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said last week. Dr. Isaac Ghinai, medical director for lab-based surveillance at the Chicago Department of Public Health, said he doesn't believe BA.2 will lead to a surge like the one previously seen during the omicron peak, but changes are expected"at some point."
"We're still trying to figure out why are we seeing this rising number of cases in some of these countries in Europe and that is because there's something markedly different about the virus," he said."So is it more transmissible? Are more people going to become infected from one infected individual? There might be some markers of that.""We often look at Europe as being that kind of bellwether of 2, 3, 4 weeks kind of ahead of us," he said.
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