“It’s gradually increasing,” he said. “But, it’s hard to get a firm estimate on that just because we’re getting so many fewer cases. The precision is kind of reduced with that.”, released Wednesday with data from March 21, UT Southwestern researchers projected that new COVID infections in Dallas County will remain around 100 per day for the next several weeks. In Tarrant County, projected COVID cases remain below 100 per day.
BA.2 is growing even more slowly in other parts of the state than in the Dallas area. At Houston Methodist, BA.2 accounted for only 1% to 3% of sequenced case batches, said Dr. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist. Public health experts expect most Americans have some protection from severe illness by BA.2 because the subvariant responds to omicron antibodies. Omicron caused a near-record high in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations at the start of the year.
One of the theories as to why BA.2 has been slow to take over the dominant variant in Texas is because of the state’s more lenient protective measures during the omicron surge, said Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “We didn’t have the protective measures, the mask mandates and vaccine mandates, that New England and other parts of the Northeast had,” she said. “A lot of people [in Texas] got infected [with omicron], so now we just don’t have as many people who, at least right now, can be infected.”
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