Small COVID Update

This is a quick follow-up on a COVID post I did last week, noting evidence of a new mini- or moderate- surge after the trough of the last month or two. I had said that my impression was that the driver was mainly the relaxation of mitigation measures — both as policy from governments and people individually changing their behavior. That seems less clear than I thought. There seems to be more evidence that the Omicron subvariant BA.2 is a key driver, perhaps the key driver. The evidence still seems muddy because BA.2 appears to have only a moderate advantage in infectiousness. And its share of cases has grown fairly slowly against the original Omicron strain. So there’s a lot about the dynamics of this latest trend that are not clear to me. But just let this stand as a partial correction or update on the earlier post which focused on declining mitigation. Be safe out there.