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IU expert says Omicron variant likely already in the U.S.

By Patrick Beane

Posted November 30, 2021

IU assistant director of public and environmental health Graham McKeen

(Pat Beane/WTIU)

An IU health expert says you can assume the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is here, even though no confirmed cases have been reported in the U.S.

And there’s still much unknown about Omicron. First detected in South Africa last week, Dutch health officials now say they found the variant as far back as 11 days ago.

“What we don’t know is all the main questions,” said Graham McKeen, assistant director of public and environmental health at IU. “We don’t know exactly how transmissible it is, how severe it is, how it performs against treatments.”

And that’s all the more reason to get the vaccine.

“At this point, I’d say if you are eligible for a booster, you need to get one now,” McKeen said. “Now is the time, and if you’re not vaccinated, it’s definitely time to start that series.”

Adding to the urgency is the fact that positive cases of the Delta variant are beginning to surge upward again. Indiana recorded more than four thousand new cases Tuesday.

“We kind of had that decline from the September-October wave of Delta, but it’s ticking back up and it’s ticking back up quickly in Indiana, so we might have an interesting winter ahead again,” McKeen said.

He said early indications suggest Omicron may be more transmissible than Delta, which is already “one of the most contagious viruses known to humans,” but also less severe.

“I hope it’s kind of like this bridge and this transition to the virus becoming more like the common cold or more endemic, like the flu,” he said.

Right now, 99.6 percent of positive cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. are the Delta variant.

McKeen says Omicron is more similar to the Alpha variant in that a specific gene market drops out, making it easily identifiable in tests.

He says available vaccines should protect you against severe illness, hospitalization and death from Omicron, but if tweaks to the vaccine need to be made, the science is there to rapidly adjust it to fight Omicron.

“It’s just insane that they can produce and get a vaccine on the market in a matter of months when the previous record prior to COVID was four years with the mumps vaccine,” McKeen said.

Vaccine hesitancy remains an issue in Indiana, the U.S. and around the world. And as long as a large number of people remain unvaccinated, more mutations of the virus could be expected.

“I think Omicron is the prime example of why we should have been out there in the last year immunizing the world, because every immunization helps us no matter where it is on the planet,” McKeen said. “And it’s likely that maybe one immunocompromised person wasn’t able to shake the virus very quickly, and that’s how it mutated.”

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