Over the past week the omicron variant has caused alarm across the world.
The Welsh Government has announced a tightening up of the rules around self-isolating because of the variant and cases have already been found in England and Scotland. Border controls have been tightened as leaders try to give themselves more time to understand the variant, which is heavily mutated, before it is spreading rapidly.
With an emerging variant it takes time before scientists are able to fully assess the level of threat it poses. The early reports from South Africa suggest that, despite the rapid rise in cases, there has not been a rapid rise in people being admitted to hospital. But experts caution that, as yet, this may only indicate that it is spreading mainly in younger age groups. WalesOnline has collated the latest evidence about how deadly the new variant is.
Vaccine bosses have very different takes on the variant with BioNTech's Ugur Sachin saying, "to my mind there's no reason to be particularly worried", but Moderna's Stephane Bancel saying he believes existing vaccines will struggle.
The data from South Africa
Chief data reporter at the Financial Times and visiting fellow at the LSE Data Science Institute John Burn-Murdoch has collated the data developing in South Africa's Gauteng province.
The data on cases in concerning. In the first two weeks there has been a huge spike in cases, with the number accelerating significantly faster than the first wave, beta wave and delta wave. This is suggests that the virus is more transmissible. However this isn't full confirmed.
In a statement the WHO said: "It is not yet clear whether omicron is more transmissible (e.g., more easily spread from person to person) compared to other variants, including delta. The number of people testing positive has risen in areas of South Africa affected by this variant, but epidemiologic studies are underway to understand if it is because of omicron or other factors."
Though cases going up is never good, it only becomes a very serious threat if it translates into hospitalisations. Here the data from South Africa gets harder to interpret. Though the cases have skyrocketed, the amount of hospitalisations hasn't followed suit and is more similar to previous waves.
Though this good news there are number of caveats to this:
- Hospitalisations are still going up. This means more pressure on already stretched health services.
- It is still very early days.
- Many of the cases in South Africa are young students. They would be less likely to be seriously ill anyway.
There are anecdotal reports from South Africa that the disease is different to what was seen previously.
The Guardian reported that at a briefing convened by South Africa’s Department of Health on Monday, Unben Pillay, a GP from practising in Midrand on the outskirts of Johannesburg, said that while “it is still early days” the cases he was seeing were typically mild: “We are seeing patients present with dry cough, fever, night sweats and a lot of body pains. Vaccinated people tend to do much better.”
They also reported that hospitals in the area were seeing mainly unvaccinated people being admitted. The Guardian quoted Rudo Mathivha, head of intensive care at Chris Hani Baragwanath, the main hospital in Soweto, painted a similar picture at a briefing on Saturday. “We’re seeing a marked change in the demographic profile of patients with Covid-19,” Mathivha said. “Young people, in their 20s to just over their late 30s, are coming in with moderate to severe disease, some needing intensive care. About 65% are not vaccinated and most of the rest are only half-vaccinated.”
What vaccine bosses are saying
Ugur Sachin is the head of BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's Covid vaccine. He believes the Pfizer jab will offer significant protection and urged people not to "freak out".
He said: "To my mind there's no reason to be particularly worried. The only thing that worries me at the moment is the fact that there are people that have not been vaccinated at all."
He added: "We think it's likely that people will have substantial protection against severe disease caused by Omicron."
This contrasts with the chief executive of Moderna who said that existing vaccines will be less effective because of the number of mutations on the spike protein of the Omicron variant.
“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level . . . we had with [the] Delta [variant],” Bancel told the Financial Times.
“I think it’s going to be a material drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I’ve talked to . . . are like, ‘This is not going to be good’.”
Wales' chief medical officer
Wales' chief medical officer Dr Frank Atherton has said that there is a "theoretical" possibility that if this variant could outcompete others and, if it is less deadly, this could be a good thing.
Dr Atherton said: "Well theoretically it could," said Dr Atherton. "All of these variants have different characteristics and something which was highly transmissible but didn't cause a lot of population harm would be far preferable to something which is highly transmissible and which causes a lot of harm.
"We could think of flu. Flu is very transmissible. It causes harm every year and people die of influenza every year but not in the numbers that we've seen with previous waves of coronavirus.
"So potentially that that could be a more favourable position than we've been we've been in the past. But we can't be complacent really. And we know that there's an equally possible scenario that [Omicron] could be more transmissible and more pathogenic and that would be the thing that we would be most fearful of."
The overwhelming message at this point needs to be that we simply don't know enough to make a categorical statement either way on whether the omicron variant is more deadly.
The current WHO advice on the severity of disease states: "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 hospitalisation 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.
"There is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with omicron are different from those from other variants. Initial reported infections were among university students—younger individuals who tend to have more mild disease—but understanding the level of severity of the omicron variant will take days to several weeks.
"All variants of Covid-19, including the delta variant that is dominant worldwide, can cause severe disease or death, in particular for the most vulnerable people, and thus prevention is always key.
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