80% of Floridians will have had COVID by end of omicron wave

Florida – As Florida continues to report a record number of daily COVID-19 cases, Dr. Ali Mokdad, of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, has been studying COVID-19 and how it spreads.

According to Mokdad, Florida has already reached its omicron peak, and that by the time the current wave is over, about 80% of Floridians will have contracted the virus since the beginning of the pandemic.

“About 40% of Americans will be infected by omicron. That means that we’re going to have the same number of cases in three months as we’ve had in the past two years,” Mokdad said.

A study released by the University of Florida last week predicted the omicron wave in Florida “is likely to cause many more infections than occurred during the delta wave, potentially infecting most of the state’s population in this wave alone.”

According to Ira Longini, a biostatistics professor at UF and a co-author in the study, those who were infected by omicron became infectious twice as fast.

He said the omicron variant has a three-day incubation period compared to the delta variant’s five-day incubation period, causing the omicron variant to spread across Florida much quicker.