Bonus - The Latest on Omicron
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Josh Sharfstein checks in again with Hopkins virologist Dr. Andy Pekosz about omicron and what the data are saying about how easily it can spread. So far, there's good news and bad news about this variant—and still a lot we don't know. Still, Dr. Pekosz explains, we can start to make some guesses based on current data and what we know about other viruses like flu.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jh.edu. |
| 0:39.9 | That's public health question at jh.h.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:45.8 | Today, I speak again with Professor Andy Peckoshe about the latest news on the Amacron variant. |
| 0:53.7 | Let's listen. Dr. Pecosh, it's great to have you. about the latest news on the Amacron variant. |
| 0:55.1 | Let's listen. |
| 0:59.6 | Dr. Peckos, it's great to have you back on the podcast. |
| 1:02.3 | We're going to talk about Omicron again. |
| 1:04.4 | What do we know from the last week? |
| 1:07.8 | Well, as you might expect, almost on an hourly basis, we're getting updates on certain aspects of the Omicron outbreak. |
| 1:12.4 | I think one thing that's becoming very clear with data out of South Africa and parts of Europe |
| 1:18.7 | in particular, that this virus really is spreading quite effectively in populations. |
| 1:25.4 | It's spreading in two different kinds of scenarios. In South Africa, there was very low amounts of COVID-19, and it seems to have sparked a surge of cases in many provinces there. And in Europe, where Delta was already well established, it also seems to be spreading at a fairly high rate. And estimates |
| 1:45.9 | are that it's spreading at a rate that's equal to Delta, if not a little bit better. So it |
| 1:50.7 | seems to be a virus that's able to transmit among individuals fairly effectively. |
| 1:55.8 | Now, what do we know about its ability to transmit among people who've had a prior COVID infection or have been vaccinated? |
| 2:04.6 | Yeah, so this is, again, that's primarily driven by South Africa, |
| 2:08.9 | but we're also seeing evidence of this in the travel associated cases. |
... |
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