BA.5 now dominant covid-19 variant in Allegheny County

The Omicron BA.5 variant is the dominant strain of the covid-19 virus in Allegheny County, health officials said Thursday.

According to the county health department’s weekly covid-19 report, the variant accounts for about two-thirds of the covid cases in Allegheny County.

The variant, which experts say is the most contagious yet, is driving the latest surge across the United States, according to the New York Times. Earlier this month, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “new waves of the virus demonstrate again that covid-19 is nowhere near over,” according to the Washington Post.

The country was averaging about 127,000 new cases each day as of Thursday, up from an average of 108,000 a month prior, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The virus continues to kill about 400 people nationwide each day, according to the CDC.

Over the past week, Allegheny County recorded 2,623 new cases. Hospitalizations in the county have fluctuated over the past several weeks: 46 over the past week, 145 a week prior, and 97 the week of June 30 through July 6.

“We’ve had a shift in our baseline,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told the Times earlier this week. “Earlier in the pandemic, we would never have accepted these numbers.”

In Westmoreland County, 283 new cases were reported Tuesday, the most recent day for which data were available. The county averaged about 71 new cases per day over the seven days prior.