December 30
Omicron Appears To Be Less Severe
Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, leading immunologist Sir John Bell has said. (Reported In The Guardian).
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the government’s life sciences adviser, said that although hospital admissions had increased in recent weeks as Omicron spreads through the population, the disease “appears to be less severe and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital”. Fewer patients were needing high-flow oxygen and the average length of stay was down to three days, he said.
Due to this new variant, cases in UK, USA and other parts of he world, have been growing very fast. USA & UK have also witnessed a surge in Covid-19 hospitalizations in recent weeks owing to the variant.
Countries like France, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Bolivia, Australia and other nations all reported surge in cases in recent days.
Initially, WHO has designated the variant B.1.1.529 a variant of concern, named Omicron, on the advice of WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution (TAG-VE). This decision was based on the evidence presented to the TAG-VE that Omicron has several mutations that may have an impact on how it behaves, for example, on how easily it spreads or the severity of illness it causes.
Now, some of the experts and scientists say, comparatively it is less severe than other variants like delta.
But, as said by WHO, it is not yet clear whether infection with Omicron causes more severe disease compared to infections with other variants, including Delta. Preliminary data suggests that there are increasing rates of hospitalization in South Africa, but this may be due to increasing overall numbers of people becoming infected, rather than a result of specific infection with Omicron.
