epidemiological analysis and effective control of covid-19 outbreaks caused by the omicron subvariant ba.2 in a medium-sized city in china, 2022

Background: more and more variants of concern (vocs) of sars-cov-2 continued to emerge in different regions worldwide. objectives: studies on covid-19 outbreaks caused by different vocs are critical for understanding their infections in humans in different regions. methods: in this descriptive study, the individual information of 64 confirmed covid-19 cases reported between march 3 and april 26, 2022, was collected, and the epidemiological features were analyzed. results: we found covid-19 epidemic caused by omicron subvariant ba.2 in 2022 had unique characteristics compared to the earliest covid-19 outbreaks in 2020 in wuhu city. first, the geographic distribution of covid-19 cases was highly concentrated, and most infections (58/64, 90.62%) were identified in one district in this study. second, the mean age of covid-19 cases in this study was 39.57 ± 16.39 years old, which was younger than the covid-19 cases identified in wuhan and wuhu cities in 2020. third, the spanned period of the covid-19 outbreak in this study was shorter than the covid-19 outbreak in 2020 in wuhu city (13 days vs. 34 days). conclusions: this study illustrates the epidemic of covid-19 in wuhu city from march to april 2022, and our result provides valuable information about covid-19 outbreak caused by omicron subvariant ba.2. it also provides insights into developing effective strategies, such as high coverage of covid-19 vaccination, lockdown policies, ankang code, and population-bases covid-19 screening, for successfully controlling the potential outbreaks caused by omicron or future novel variants of sars-cov-2 in the medium-sized city like wuhu.