The prestigious University of Florida, located in Gainesville and considered the fifth best state university in the country, carried out a projection of the behavior of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in the southern state. According to your model, Most of the population will have been infected with the virus before this wave of infections ends.
“The rank of those who we expect them to become infected is between 70 and 80 percent of all Florida residents, at least. If you look at the infection curve, we already believe that there were at least a million infections towards the end of December and the beginning of January alone ”, indicated the doctor Ira Longini, an expert in biostatistics at the University of Florida and responsible for the aforementioned study.
Longini, as other experts have said before, confirms that what is being observed is that Ómicron is a much more contagious variant than the previous ones, spreading faster, with a shorter incubation period (three days, versus five days of incubation for the Delta variant).
“The degree of immune escape is greater than we originally thought. All of this contributes to the fact that more people are becoming infected ”, added Dr. Longini.
The White House confirmed the first Omicron case in the United States on December 1. Approximately a week later, the first case detected in the state of Florida was confirmed. From the University of Washington endorse the contagion forecasting model developed by the University of Florida and agree that 80% of the population will have been infected in the coming weeks.
“At the country level, we expect 40% of the population to be infected with Omicron. This implies that in three months we would have the same level of infections as in the previous two years”, Indicated the doctor Ali Mokdad, MD, University of Washington Institute for Health Assessment and Metrics.
This discovery comes at a time when the Florida is reporting regarding 80,000 new cases a day. These are the highest daily reports of new infections since the start of the pandemic.
But The good news is that the risk of mortality with Omicron is much lower than with previous variants.
“There is no doubt regarding this. The number of severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths that we are seeing is a third of what was seen with the Delta variant”Longini said. The study predicts that the peak of the wave will occur next week, in mid-January, with an average of 90 thousand new cases a day.
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