The Omicron variant is spreading so quickly globally that when the county's health officer updated the Board of Supervisors on the pandemic in Santa Barbara late Tuesday evening, his statistics from the day before were already out of date. "The U.K. has the most confirmed cases of Omicron worldwide," Dr. Henning Ansorg said to the supervisors from a video link, adding that the variant represented 40 percent of cases there and noting that his slide, which said 20 percent, was from yesterday. In South Africa, where it was first identified, 90 percent of new cases were now sequenced as Omicron.
"We usually trail the U.K. by six to eight weeks," said Ansorg, who had expected the Delta variant to prevail locally for the next two months, but that idea may be outdated, too. The Centers for Disease Control announced today that it estimated that 8 percent of new cases were Omicron — 11 percent in New York and New Jersey. "This is concerning," Ansorg said, "because a week ago, it was 0.4 percent of the general case rate; it was 2.9 percent on Saturday."
What was different about Omicron was that it only took two to three days to double in number; Delta did the same thing in four to five days. It was also infecting people for a second time. Showing a detailed image of the variant, Ansorg described the mutations on the protein spike that made it spread faster but also somehow protected the virus from the human immune system.
