Omicron subvariant detected in Illinois by Northwestern Medicine

“If BA.2 follows the same pattern in the U.S. as observed in countries like the United Kingdom, Denmark or India, we could observe a slowing of the current decline in new cases,” said Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, the bioinformatics director at Northwestern Medicine’s Center for Pathogen Genomics and Microbial Evolution, in a news release. “In this case, the number of new cases could stabilize for a while before starting to decrease again. It is still too soon to know because there are still very few BA.2 cases in the U.S.”