The surge of the latest Covid variant is likely to be short – but without appropriate measures, it could still wreak havoc
- Dr William Hanage is a professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard
To call Omicron’s rise in the UK “precipitate” is to violently understate matters. Daily case counts have broken the record set just the day before over and over again. Yesterday they hit over 218,000.
Amid such an astonishing surge of infection, consequences are unavoidable. Despite consistent evidence suggesting that Omicron causes somewhat less severe illness, especially in vaccinated and boosted people, numbers like this wreak their own havoc.
Dr William Hanage is a professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard and the co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics
