Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine welcomes back Ajay Sethi to talk about the new omicron variant of COVID-19. Ajay is an epidemiologist and Associate Professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison. With omicron only discovered about a month ago, Ajay distinguishes what we know from what we don’t know yet. One thing we do know is how contagious this variant is compared to the previous ones, even infecting those with vaccinations. In just one week the number of cases involving omicron went from just 4% to 75%. But for now, omicron doesn’t seem to be more severe than even the delta variant. So far, even vaccinated people appear to have mild symptoms. And thus for added protection, Ajay highly recommends getting a booster shot. As contagious as omicron, the most vulnerable continue to be the unvaccinated. And with so many still unvaccinated and the omicron variant having 50 mutations, the next variant could be even more deadly.

For more information, here’s a link to the CDC webpage on omicron.

And here’s the main webpage on COVID-19 from Public Health Madison and Dane County.

Image courtesy: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

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