Dr. Costi Sifri is the University of Virginia Medical Center’s epidemiologist. “In the United States, we’re seeing an increased amount of BA2, the sort of sister variant of the omicron strain,” Sifri said Thursday. Sifri says the latest COVID-19 variant, BA2, is not hitting Charlottesville hard right now. “It seems that it has a complex system. It’s very similar to omicron, which is largely, you know, what we saw in January, an upper respiratory tract infection for many people,” the doctor said.