Is it safe to travel while omicron BA.5 is rolling out?

Summer travel is booming, and while most pandemic-era restrictions at airports are gone, the coronavirus has more surprises in store.

BA.5, the newest omicron subvariant, spread rapidly, becoming the dominant variant in the United States and creating a wave of covid-19 cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports an average of more than 120,000 new cases per day in the United States, and that doesn’t include the huge estimates of people not reporting home test results. Hospitalizations in the United States have increased 10 percent in the past week, according to data tracked by The Washington Post.