On January 11, the United States reported a record-breaking 1.35 million new COVID-19 infections, shattering the previous record set just eight days before. The sky-high case rate – roughly four times higher than numbers of daily infections seen last January – are a testament to the transmissibility of the Omicron variant. A highly mutated version of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the Omicron variant has been shown to cause breakthrough infections among the vaccinated thanks to its ability to evade the virus-killing neutralizing antibodies that the body makes in response to getting vaccinated.
