On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a significant revision to their earlier estimate of the prevalence of Omicron cases in the U.S. The CDC had previously reported that, for the week ended Dec. 18, the Omicron variant accounted for 73.2 percent of new cases. They were now adjusting that figure down to 22.5 percent.
Not a minor change.
In the week ended Dec. 25, the agency advised that the number of new cases attributed to Omicron had nearly tripled to 58.6 percent.
CDC estimates of circulating variants including week of 12/25. Notably week of 12/18 estimate of Omicron revised from ~73% to 22.5% (just a tad different!).
Now saying 58.6% of variants are Omicron nationwide. 1/ pic.twitter.com/duYpLSEXQm
— Jason Gallagher 🇺🇦 (@JGPharmD) December 28, 2021
A CDC spokesperson issued a statement to explain the revision which said, “We had more data come in from that timeframe and there was a reduced proportion of Omicron. It’s important to note that we’re still seeing a steady increase in the proportion of Omicron.”
According to Fox News:
As the CDC collects more data, they can more accurately pinpoint the proportions of each variant throughout the country, according to Dr. Li Tang, an associate faculty member in the Department of Biostatistics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
“Earlier, they probably relied on a small number of available sequences. It should be also noted, although the confidence interval now is narrower, the range is still big, covering from 41.5% to 74%, suggesting large uncertainty,” Dr. Tang told Fox News Digital.
The new estimates mean that the Delta variant was still dominant for most of December, though Omicron has a slight edge now.
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