A leading expert has issued an urgent warning that Omicron cases will be missed in the UK if people look for 'traditional' Covid symptoms.
Professor Tim Spector, from the Covid Zoe app, said that in around 10 days’ time the UK could have more cases of Omicron than some countries it had put on the travel red list.
He warned that people should not be keeping an eye out for a fever, cough and loss of taste or smell as the new strain presents differently.
The professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London told BBC Breakfast: “The official estimates are about 350-odd Omicron cases, and because the current testing is missing a lot of those, it’s probably at least 1,000 to 2,000 I would guess at the moment."
He said that data from the Zoe symptom study app suggests that about half of all cases at the moment of Omicron are being 'missed' because they are not presenting with 'classic' Covid symptoms of fever, new and persistent cough and a loss or change of smell or taste.
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“Omicron is probably more, much more similar to the mild variants we’re seeing in people who have been vaccinated with Delta than anything else,” he said.
“And so it is going to be producing cold-like symptoms that people won’t recognise as Covid if they just believe the official Government advice.”
Dr Spector also warned that the new variant of coronavirus can transmit quickly.
“It kind of has a set of mutations in its genome, some of which we’ve seen before, and others of which we’ve only predicted, to make it bind very tightly to human cells to latch on and infect them", he said.
“So that probably helps it transmit and it also has mutations in many of the positions which are known to be the places where antibodies that we make from vaccines for example, latch on to the virus.
“And so because those have been changed, it’s highly likely that this virus will be less well neutralised by vaccines.
“Again, we’ll see that with sort of laboratory data in a few weeks, but the speed at which it is moving through both vaccinated countries and countries with a lot of previous infection like South Africa, are strongly implicating that it can indeed evade some amount of immunity.”
