Omicron Variant

The BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants continue to drive the county’s case and hospitalization numbers, keeping San Diego County in the “high” COVID-19 activity level.

We put a call out to San Diegans for COVID-related questions at the top of their mind, and then shared them with a Sharp Health doctor.

We posted a call-out for Instagram users to send in questions they have about the latest COVID-19 subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5.

The latest mutation, which is spreading in India, has the ability to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infections, reports NBC 7’s Kelvin Henry.

“This is what viruses do, the job of a virus is to go viral.”

New omicron subvariants are responsible for the latest spike in cases, reports NBC 7’s Melissa Adan.

Pfizer says tweaking its COVID-19 vaccine to better target the omicron variant is safe and boosts protection.

Coachella was mostly outdoors, but the festival did not require masks or vaccination.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it would be appealing a ruling which lifted the travel face mask mandate, after the CDC determined masks continue to be necessary for the public good.

Omicron BA.2, also known as “stealth omicron,” has been the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the U.S. since March 2022.

The CDC announced Wednesday that it was extending the national mask requirement for public transportation systems through May 3 as it monitors an uptick in COVID-19 cases in parts of the country.

The BA.2 omicron subvariant is more contagious and can re-infect people, but isn’t more virulent, studies find.

The new variant BA.2 is more infectious than omicron but it is less deadly, UC San Diego’s chief of infectious diseases told NBC 7’s Melissa Adan

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention outlined new measures for communities where COVID cases are dropping on Friday, meaning healthy people in these areas can take a break from wearing masks

The omicron wave that assaulted the United States this winter also bolstered its defenses, leaving enough protection against the coronavirus that future spikes will likely require much less — if any — dramatic disruption to society.

“When we reduce these measures, we increase our vulnerability of having transmission continue to go high,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at the Pandemic Prevention Institute. She joined LX News to talk about mask restrictions and what loosening them could mean for the nation.

Experts say it’s too early to know whether people infected with the omicron variant will develop long COVID

Predictive modeling suggests that the omicron surge is receding, reports NBC 7’s Priya Sridhar.

Modeling by Scripps Health predicts that the current surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations should wind down by early March, with a slow decrease in patient volume driven by the Omicron variant of the virus over the coming weeks, the health system said Tuesday.

The highly infectious Omicron variant of COVID-19 was far worse than expected, says NBC News medical contributor Dr. John Torres. Despite symptoms being less severe, the variant was so infectious that absolute numbers of cases still skyrocketed and thus hospitals were overwhelmed. But Torres and health officials are hopeful there will be a decline in hospitalizations and deaths in a...