“There’s no question in my mind that we’re missing a vast majority of infections right now,” said White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said on NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” on Thursday. “The truth is, there are probably several hundred thousand, four or five hundred thousand, infections today happening across the country.”
That would put the daily case count at levels seen during the January surge of the omicron variant. The current outbreak is now mostly the result of the fast-spreading BA.5 subvariant, named the dominant strain this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s the rapid spread of new variants that keep boosting new case counts, even in people who may have previously believed they had become immune.
“We are seeing a lot of reinfections within months of prior infections. It’s a reminder that an infection does not give you lifelong immunity,” Jha said. “It’s also a reminder that we’re seeing rapid evolution of a virus that’s trying to escape that prior-infection immunity.”
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