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Omicron : Here are 5 Symptoms —Mild As They Look, Don’t Underestimate This Variant-Experts
December 16, 2021
January 22, 2022
A 35-year-old man returned to the U.S. from Wuhan, China on Jan. 15, 2020, and fell ill with a cough and fever.
He had read an alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan and sought treatment at an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington four days later.
The man said he had not spent time at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, where a cluster of early cases were identified in December. He was admitted to isolation unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash. for observation.
Then-President Donald Trump said the U.S. had it “totally under control.” “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine,” Trump told “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In the two years since that first confirmed case, the virus has torn through the U.S. with a ferocity and duration few anticipated. The human toll is staggering, with more than 860,000 people dead and more than 69 million total infections. Hospitals around the nation have been pushed to the breaking point with more than 4 million admissions of confirmed Covid patients since August 2020, when the CDC started tracking hospitalizations. The hospital admissions are an undercount because they do not include the wave of cases that first hit the U.S. in spring 2020 when hospitals were caught flat-footed and testing was inadequate.
Though the U.S. now has effective vaccines and therapeutics to fight Covid, the future course of the pandemic remains uncertain as the virus mutates into new variants that are more transmissible and can evade vaccine protection. The highly contagious omicron variant has pushed infections and hospitalizations to record highs across the globe this month, a shock to a weary public that wants a return to normal life after two years of lockdowns, event cancellations, working from home and mask and vaccine mandates.
The rapid evolution of the virus and the dramatic waves of infection that would follow, from alpha to delta and omicron, came as a surprise to many elected leaders, public health officials and scientists. Dr Michael Osterholm, a top epidemiologist, said the Covid mutations are the big unknown that will determine the future course of the pandemic.
“We don’t yet understand how these variants emerge and what they are capable of doing,” Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minnesota, commented. “Look at how omicron caught us as a global community surprised by the rapid transmission, the immune evasion. Look at delta and all the impact it had on disease severity,” he said.
