Early reports from South Africa seem to indicate omicron The coronavirus variant is much more contagious than earlier variants and causes milder illness, though experts there warn that data will certainly not be available for weeks.
Dr. Warner Greene, director of the HIV Cure Research Center at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco, said: “This virus has both buckets – highly infectious and has the ability to evade immunity. But it’s possible. what it lacks is the ability to cause disease.”
COVID-19 infections in South Africa’s Gauteng province are doubling every day, and 75% of infections are due to omicrons. The number of hospital admissions is also increasing week by week.
But so far, there has been no increase in the number of deaths or even those hospitalized requiring oxygen, said Greene, who spoke on the call with reporters on Monday.
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Currently, the global epicenter of the omicron cases is Tshwane district in Gauteng province, northeast of Johannesburg. According to the South African Medical Research Council.
There are already early clinical reports from hospitals in Gauteng, Greene said, and they are encouraging.
“This appears to be a highly infectious virus, but it may not be as virulent or pathogenic as the delta variant,” he said. But more data is needed to draw any firm conclusions.
Even the feel of the hospitals is different this time, Dr Fareed Abdullah of the research council wrote in a post on Saturday.
During all three previous COVID-19 outbreaks in the country, “the COVID area was recognized by the majority of patients receiving oxygen with some form of supplemental oxygen with the incessant sound of high-flow oxygen ventilators.” or the alarm beep of the ventilator.”
Abdullah does not believe that it is still possible to tell if omicrons are lighter than what is seen today.
This is likely due to the usual lag between cases and deaths, and the trend will become more apparent in the coming weeks, he wrote.
Omicron is the most recently discovered variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. It was first detected in southern Africa and named a “worrisome variant” by the World Health Organization on November 26.
As of Monday, it has been detected in more than 38 countries and one-third of the states of the United States.
Risk of re-infection with omicron
Omicron has more 50 mutants and seems to be much more contagious than the delta variant.
The extent of the disease’s spread is determined by its basal reproduction number, sometimes written Rt.
For measles, the number is 12 to 18, meaning that on average, each person with measles infects 12 to 18 other people. The number for COVID-19 was initially estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.4, according to World Health Organization.
Rt for omicron variation seems to be around 3.5, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle is monitoring it.
Where did the omicron variant of the coronavirus come from? Scientists think it evolved in a person.
“These are still very early estimates, and all of this will become clearer as we get comparable estimates from different geographies and with different methods.” Bedford tweeted, noting that the data he used was from South Africa.
“Even an Rt of 3 is very high,” he wrote. “I would expect that prior immunity would protect against serious outcomes, but I am very concerned about the scale of the wave in the US and around the world.”
An article published Thursday from data from South Africa’s National Smart Health Condition Monitoring System found that prior infection with COVID-19 did not provide the same protection against omicrons as in the beta and delta variants.
The article, which remains uncensored, is at risk of reinfection. The study estimated that omicrons were twice as likely to cause reinfection as earlier variants.
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Overall, news about the variant’s transmissibility and virulence could be good news, with the certainty that it’s several weeks away, the experts said.
“It would be great if omicrons were so concentrated in the plains,” said Greene. “If omicrons were a less pathogenic virus, that would be very good news for the human race.”
It also makes sense for the virus to evolve in a less dangerous direction, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“It is never in your favor for the virus to kill you,” he said. “All viruses want to be the common cold, just inhale while you’re walking around to infect others.”
