The US won't have a BA.2 wave this spring, here's why.
You can safely ignore the New York Times and other publications saying otherwise.
The media is consistently a step off with what is going to happen in the Pandemic. This has caused people to think it’s safe when it’s not— ie. completely ignoring the Delta wave in India and thinking the pandemic was over Summer 2021— or forecasting doom when it is the safest. This latest BA.2 doom forecast is likely in reaction to dropping the ball on the Delta wave. Last Spring and Summer as me and my team of volunteers at the Global Health Research Collective worked agonizingly to try and help out with the Oxygen shortage in India and warned of a Delta wave in the US, the media touted a “wet hot vax Summer” and the end of the Pandemic. Major COVID-19 dashboards were even taken down or stopped reporting data. This week, when cases are the lowest they’ve been since early March 2020, the media is running scare pieces about how BA.2 is definitely about to cause a surge in the US.
Good news, we are not going to get a BA.2 wave in the US. We won’t be due for another wave until this Summer and it won’t be BA.2. To understand why— we first need to look at why the media and some “experts” are saying that we will get a wave and the flawed logic behind that. The first evidence that is being cited is that “we go up after Europe”. First of all, that is only sometimes true— it is true when variants travel first to Europe (due to flight patterns, Delta, Omicron) or originate there (Alpha in UK). Iota was home grown and P.1 and P.2 came up from S. America and hit N. America before Europe. If you look at the case pattern in Europe vs. US, many European countries had Omicron spikes after the US making Europe as a whole shifted later not earlier than the US.
Second, countries did not descend all the way down to baseline like the US has and then shoot back up. Instead, there was a double peak. People are misattributing this to BA.2, which is slightly more transmissible than the original Omicron variant but not enough to cause this peak. The European double peak is primarily due to the fact that Europe as a whole has had stricter policies than the US and thus was not completely open (and completely infected) over the Holidays like we were. You can see that the height of their peak was not as high as ours, corroborating the fact that we had more cases/population than Europe did. In addition, the US had astronomical test positivity rates over the winter Holidays, reaching 60-80% positive in many places, which suggests that the real number of cases could have been 20X or more than what was being reported. Taken together this is strong evidence that our immunity wall was higher than most of Europe’s was at the same point in time.
This brings me to my next point— BA.2 does not escape immunity from BA.1 unlike Omicron, Delta, Beta, and other variants have from the variant before them. So we are NOT seeing reinfection with BA.2 to any significant degree in people who had original Omicron, BA.1. We therefore have frankly mostly run out of people to infect with BA.2. It’s going to take waning immunity and another variant with immune escape to get past our current immunity wall. I expect this new variant to arrive roughly 6 months after the last wave— as seems to be the pattern with previous waves— so expect case spikes in Summer 2022, not now.
Lastly, the media, who have cited so-called “experts”, claim that we are seeing upticks in the US. They are citing numbers like “1000% more cases”. 1000% of a very small number is still a very small number. And they are failing to note the location of spikes— which are all in regions that are rural and away from major travel hubs (orange and yellow below). This is important because these places are the last to see spikes because variants arrive at them last. This is consistent with these counties having spikes not because of BA.2 but because they are still in the winter BA.1 wave. The US CDC has 95% of counties at low (green) levels of cases and the remote counties that are at high or medium levels are decreasing in numbers (see percent change below).
The pattern that we would expect if these tiny case spikes were because of BA.2 would be cases going up in major coastal cities— NYC, Boston, L.A., D.C., Miami. We are not seeing this because… we are not going to get a BA.2 wave.
So enjoy your freedom now to whatever level you feel comfortable with, don’t cancel immediate future plans, or feel super anxious. Take a break and rest up for whatever the next mystery variant is that is coming in June or July 2022.
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