Omicron, the Most Deadly COVID-19 Variant to Date By Liam Greco

You may be wondering, why does everyone around seem much more worried about COVID-19? After all, our whole school is getting vaccinated, and there are more indoor school activities available. I hate to break it to you, but the Omicron Covid variant is as deadly as COVID-19 has ever been. The numbers are flying up everywhere, and even fully-vaccinated people have found themselves hospitalized due to the newest variant of the virus. Here is a graph that shows the numbers from a portion of the last two years from the New York Times.

This graph shows that the virus has come back hard as people started to take masks off in June 2021, you can see the rise from June to October. This caused the Omicron variant to arrive on November 24, 2021, in South Africa. Now, what can we do to protect ourselves from the Omicron variant of COVID-19? As proven by the numbers, fully vaccinated people have had less severity in their cases when/if they got COVID. On the other hand, non-vaccinated people have suffered cases during Omicron that were worse than any other variant before. I would suggest that when you are inside with others that you stay masked or get a negative PCR test before you meet. It tends to be different for fully vaccinated people, as the government doesn't require them to be masked indoors, but science has proved that the virus is still here so you should always think twice before taking your mask off indoors or outdoors.