The new variant has not yet been adequately researched.
(Photo: imago images / Eibner)
Johannesburg / Berlin Studies suggest that Omicron may make you less sick than the delta variant of the coronavirus. On Wednesday, however, experts warned against hasty conclusions: “At the moment, the data on the severity of Omikron’s disease seem a bit too thin to be able to make any general statements,” said Isabella Eckerle, an infectious agent from the University of Geneva.
A new study showed a rather mild course of the disease in infections with the coronavirus variant Omikron in South Africa. A team of researchers from Great Britain had come to similar results in laboratory tests. Both works were only uploaded to preprint servers, which means that they have not yet been independently assessed. The team in South Africa had done a special PCR test to detect Omikron, but not a full sequencing as is usual in Germany.
The authors of the study from South Africa evaluated data from infected people from the beginning of October to the end of November. According to the authors, this results in an up to 80 percent lower risk of hospital treatment for Omikron than for Delta. Once the patients were in the clinic, there was no difference in the further course.
“The very encouraging data strongly suggest a lesser severity of the omicron wave of infection,” said Cheryl Cohen of South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) on Wednesday. However, she warned that the data are still early and that more studies are needed.
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Eckerle also warned not to jump to conclusions from the investigation. “You also have to keep in mind that South Africa has a young population, there has been high excess mortality in the previous waves, and the cases reported have mostly been young people with breakthroughs in vaccination,” she said. “The beta variant was also increasingly circulating in South Africa, so that there is probably a different immunological background than ours.”
“It remains to be seen”
Björn Meyer, head of the virus evolution working group at the University of Magdeburg, made a similar statement. There are big differences between South Africa and Germany. South Africa has experienced a lot of heavy waves, the population is on average much younger. “So it remains to be seen.”
The authors of the laboratory study from Great Britain generated so-called pseudoviruses that carry the omicron spike protein on their surface. Compared to the delta pseudovirus, the omicron pseudovirus was less able to infect lung cells. The researchers interpret their data in such a way that, due to the many mutations in the spike protein, Omikron can partially escape an existing immune response, but the virus variant cannot infect cells and spread as well. To what extent the results can be transferred to real life, however, is unclear.
You can extrapolate the data from the laboratory “only with great caution to the actual situation in humans,” said Eckerle. The infection in humans is “much more complex”.
In any case, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, Lothar Wieler, expects the corona situation in Germany to worsen. “We can still not assess with certainty whether Omikron makes less sick,” he said on Wednesday at a press conference. “But even if that were the case: Omikron is extremely contagious and can escape the immune system more easily. This also leads to infections more frequently in those who have recovered and who have been vaccinated twice, and these can also be passed on. “
Greater portability
In South Africa, the Omikron variant currently dominates the infection process. However, the number of hospital admissions is well below that of previous waves of infection.
A third study, which was known in the evening and no longer commented on by the experts, also suggests that Omikron leads to hospital admissions less often. Researchers at Imperial College in London had compared the data of all corona cases in England in the first two weeks of December, in which a special procedure could distinguish between delta and omicron. That was several hundred thousand people. It is estimated that the risk of hospitalization of at least one day for Omicron infections is reduced by about 40 percent on average compared to Delta infections.
However, the researchers at Imperial College indicated that the effect would be partially offset across the whole country by the higher transferability of the Omikron variant. In addition, large parts of the population in both South Africa and Great Britain have already been infected with other corona variants through previous waves and have thus acquired a certain immunity against Omikron. This report, too, has not yet been examined by independent experts and published in a specialist journal.
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