Is America about to dodge the BA.2 bullet?
For weeks now, BA.2 — an even more transmissible subvariant of BA.1, the original, hypercontagious Omicron strain — has been wreaking havoc across Europe, triggering steep and sudden resurgences of infection just as the continent’s enormous winter wave finally seemed to be subsiding. In England, COVID-19 hospitalizations haven’t been higher since the pre-vaccine era.
At first, the fear was that BA.2 would spark a similar U.S. surge. But dig into the latest data, and it looks like something different might be happening instead: a less dangerous and disruptive type of COVID “bump” that could foreshadow the next phase of the pandemic — if