COLUMBUS – With Opening Day a couple of weeks off, Ohio’s top health official relied on some baseball metaphors to explain why residents should not completely let their guards down as cases of COVID-19 plummet.
“COVID-19 has a real habit of throwing us curve balls,” Department of Health director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff said in a news briefing Thursday.
Coronavirus cases in Ohio are the lowest since last July, but Vanderhoff said officials are closely watching the BA.2 variant, nicknamed the “stealth variant,” which caused a surge in cases in Europe and China.
The BA.2 subvariant is supplanting an earlier version of the omicron variant of the virus, but may not bring about another spike in cases like the one caused by that strain.
“BA.2 is playing cleanup but probably won’t hit a home run,” Vanderhoff said.
He repeated calls for Ohioans to get vaccinations against the coronavirus to protect themselves.
The state Thursday reported 3,668 new confirmed and probable cases in Ohio over the past week. The state stopped reporting data daily on March 17 and plans to continue with only weekly updates.
Watching for the next variant
Experts are watching for a potential new COVID-19 surge in the U.S. — and wondering how long it will take to detect.
They say recent changes could hurt the nation’s ability to see the beginning of a new wave.
Those changes include how Americans are getting tests and a decision by federal officials to reduce the number of labs hunting to variants.
Health officials are increasingly focusing on hospital admissions, which rise only after a surge has arrived.
Some experts say a wastewater surveillance program is an effective way to detect the spread of the virus early.
“Wastewater monitoring is a very reliable tool because it captures community-level, or building-level, or neighborhood-level virus trends,” Ohio State Environmental Health Sciences professor Jiyoung Lee said.
Critics say the system remains a patchwork that cannot yet be counted on to fully understand coming surges.