The last time the Legal Insurrection team held an event in California, COVID-19 was just starting to be recognized as spreading through this country.
Now that the team is back out in the Golden State, news breaks that the first US case of the mild Omicron variant has been detected from a California who traveled from South Africa.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with the California Department of Public Health, confirmed Wednesday that the case was detected in a traveler who returned from South Africa on Nov. 22.The variant was detected using genomic sequencing by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.According to the CDC, the person was fully vaccinated and has had mild symptoms so far. All the patient’s close contacts have tested negative so far.“This is not a surprise. For those of you that have been following this, we knew that Omicron was going to be here, we thought it was already here, we just hadn’t detected it yet,” San Francisco Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said in a news briefing Wednesday. “So this is cause for concern, but its also certainly not a cause for us to panic.”
The political drama surrounding Omicron has been hyped so much, even the governor had to comment on the mild illness from a now increasingly common virus.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a separate briefing Wednesday, said the patient is between 18 and 49 and had not received a booster shot because they were not six months out from their original vaccination course.“This individual has not been hospitalized,” Newsom said. “The individuals that this individual has come into contact with have not tested positive yet to our knowledge, and we are hopeful of full recovery and expect nothing less based on what we’ve learned.”
There is now a report of a possible case in Oregon.
While this is the first official case, it is possible the variant is already in Oregon. Dr. Paul Cieslak, the medical director for communicable diseases and immunizations with the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), says the agency is concerned about the variant’s presence in the U.S. and they “are watching closely what happens with this.”“I think one thing that we do know is, it seems to be more transmissible because in South Africa, where it was discovered, it appears to have outcompeted Delta, so that’s concerning,” Dr. Cieslak said.
I sure hope Professor Jacobson and the rest of the team leave here as healthy as they arrived! I would like to have everyone back…we need the help.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY