A study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday showed that the omicron variant of COVID-19 makes people sick faster than earlier variants of the virus.
The study showed that people usually get symptoms three days after exposure to the virus with the omicron variant, while symptoms appeared four days later with the delta variant and five days or longer with the original virus.
People are more likely to be contagious sooner after exposure, and possibly before they test positive.
The CDC's recent study focused on a family in Nebraska that were infected with omicron a year after catching COVID-19. Just one of the five family members was vaccinated, and all five suffered from similar or more mild symptoms with omicron.
The data showed that omicron is making people have symptoms faster, reinforcing what doctors have been seeing with the new variant.
"We're seeing people test positive as early as Day 2," Dr. Daniel Griffin, chief of infectious diseases for ProHealth Care, said.
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Griffin added that symptoms with omicron may appear before a person tests positive.
"Do the rapid (test) today, but do it again tomorrow," Griffin said.
Experts are recommending to take a rapid test immediately before a social gathering, not a couple of days beforehand. Dr. Anthony Fauci, among other experts, has also advised people to "stay away" from large gatherings for New Year's Eve, and to only meet with people once you've been fully vaccinated and the people you are meeting with have also been fully vaccinated.
"The thing to do is to postpone when the force of infection is so high and look for a time in the future when it's safer to do these things," Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, said. "In a few weeks, the situation may be substantially better."
There were more than 400,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Dec. 28, with a seven-day moving average of over 277,000 cases in the Unites States.
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