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Covid's Omicron wave may be headed for rapid drop in US, Britain as scientists suspect peak - The New Indian Express

Covid's Omicron wave may be headed for rapid drop in US, Britain as scientists suspect peak - The New Indian Express

Covid's Omicron wave may be headed for rapid drop in US, Britain as scientists suspect peak - The New Indian Express
Jan 12, 2022 2 mins, 3 secs

Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19′s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically.

Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19′s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically.

“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.

Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London.

The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.

“We are seeing a definite falling-off of cases in the U.K., but I’d like to see them fall much further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr.

Differences between Britain and South Africa, including Britain's older population and the tendency of its people to spend more time indoors in the winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak for the country and other nations like it.

Shabir Mahdi, dean of health sciences at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said European countries that impose lockdowns won't necessarily come through the omicron wave with fewer infections; the cases may just be spread out over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there have been 7 million new COVID-19 cases across Europe in the past week, calling it a “tidal wave sweeping across the region.” WHO cited modeling from Mokdad's group that predicts half of Europe’s population will be infected with omicron within about eight weeks.

Still, the sheer numbers of people infected could prove overwhelming to fragile health systems, said Dr.

Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in the pandemic, said Meyers, at the University of TexasP

“At the end of this wave, far more people will have been infected by some variant of COVID,” Meyers saidN

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