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“But it’s fairly likely we’ll see cases,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
“It ought to redouble our efforts to use the tools that we have, which are vaccinations and boosters — and to be sure we’re getting those to the rest of the world, too,” Collins told CNN on Sunday.
“It also means we need to pay attention to those mitigation strategies that people are just really sick of, like wearing masks when you’re indoors with other people who might not be vaccinated, and keeping that social distance,” he said.
“I know, America — you’re really tired of hearing those things. But the virus is not tired of us. And it’s shapeshifting itself.”
Why Omicron ‘looks different’ from other variants
As coronavirus keeps spreading, new mutations — and new variants — are expected.
“We have seen a lot of variants pop up over the last five, six months, and most of them have not amounted to much. This looks different,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
And “10 or more” of the mutations are on the receptor binding domain, which “binds to the cells in your nasal pharynx and in your lung,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told NBC on Sunday.
“In other words, the profile of the mutations strongly suggest that it’s going to have an advantage in transmissibility,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.
When experts looked at other variants, Jha said, it usually took several months for those strains to be dominant — in other words, the most common strain of the virus spreading in one area.
“This one has become dominant very quickly in South Africa in the regions where it’s been found — within a matter of days to weeks, as opposed to…
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Source : cnn
