Over the Thanksgiving holiday, news broke of a new variant with ties to South Africa, and reports of spread are occurring throughout parts of Africa and Europe. It is called the Omicron variant.

Dr. Hazel Barton is a professor and director of the Integrated Bioscience Program at the University of Akron, and she joined the Ray Horner Morning Show to make sense of this Omicron variant and what she knows about it at this juncture. Dr. Barton says she and other microbiologists do not know a lot about this particular variant right now, but it seems it may be more infectious than the Delta variant. She foresees COVID-19 as being endemic going forward, and the path out of this is through continued vaccination and boosters.