Amid a surge in Omicron coronavirus cases in the United States, with New York announcing three more cases of the variant, top health officials warned that "community spread has begun" in the country. "The omicron variant is here, and as anticipated we are seeing the beginning of community spread," New York state health commissioner Mary Bassett told media. Cases are being increasingly reported in other states too. Massachusetts and Washington state announced their first cases on Saturday, a day after New Jersey, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Maryland reported their first confirmed cases. Missouri reported its first presumed case on Friday. The variant has also been detected in Nebraska, Minnesota, California, Hawaii, Colorado and Utah.
Contact tracing is underway in earnest. In New York City, officials quickly reached out to a man who tested positive for the variant and had attended an anime conference at a Manhattan convention center last month along with more than 50,000 people. Five other attendees have also been infected with the coronavirus, though officials don't yet know whether it was with the omicron variant.
While much is still unknown about the variant, early reports are raising alarms. New COVID-19 cases in South Africa, which first alerted the world to omicron last week, have burgeoned from about 200 a day in mid-November to more than 16,000 on Friday. Some of the US cases involve people who hadn't travelled recently, meaning the variant was likely already circulating domestically in some parts of the country.
