The U.S. still stands at 12 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. We’ve been at this level for just about two weeks. So, maybe we’re about to enter the long-awaited winter wave of COVID. That said, judging from the recent European experience, if we have a winter wave this year, it’s not likely to be much of a wave.
Graphs follow.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 10/19/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Here’s where we are in the context of the past two years.
A month ago, the news media were full stories about the European winter wave, and why we should be very, very scared — even though nothing was happening in the U.S. You probably haven’t noticed it, but they’ve stopped reporting about the European winter wave of COVID. That’s because it’s turning out to be pretty mild. And, as always, good news is no news.
Source: Our world in data.
The only new item on the U.S. horizon is that the virus continues to evolve enough to have new names assigned to the most recent strains. A few months back, the CDC variants list was dominated by BA.4 and BA.5, which were at that time the most recent variants of Omicron. Now there are some newcomers, so it’s worth trying to track what those are:
Source: CDC
OK, turning to the master list of all COVID strains (at this reference):
BQ.1.1 = Alias of B.1.1.529.5.3.1.1.1.1.1.1 = BA.5.3.1.1.1.1.1.1 = BE.1.1.1.1.1 = BQ.1.1. So the new BQ.1.1 strain is an offshoot of Omicron variant BA.5
BQ.1, similarly is an offshoot of BA.5
BF.7 = Alias of B.1.1.529.5.2.1.7 = BA.5.2.1.7 = BF.7. So that’s yet a third offshoot of Omicron variant BA.5
In short, in the opinions of the experts who run this system, the virus has not evolved past Omicron. All of the growth of new variants are classified as merely further variations on the Omicron BA.5 variant.
