The Omicron variant of coronavirus is spreading quickly in several countries where it has hit. Even if it causes only mild disease — and that’s far from certain — that’s alarming.
It’s killed at least one person in the UK and put 10 into the hospital — most of them vaccinated, according to government authorities. “It is spreading faster than the Delta variant in South Africa where Delta circulation was low, but also appears to spread more quickly than the Delta variant in other countries where the incidence of Delta is high, such as in the United Kingdom,” the World Health Organization said in a technical briefing last week. “Given the current available data, it is likely that Omicron will outpace the Delta variant where community transmission occurs,” WHO added. It’s not clear how severe the new variant is, although most cases that have been diagnosed so far have been mild. That could be reassuring, but if Omicron spreads more easily than Delta and previous variants, evades the protection offered by vaccines and by previous infection, and ends up infecting more people, that could mean more people end up in the hospital and more die. “What we now know about Omicron is that… it’s spreading at a phenomenal rate, something that we’ve never seen before. It’s doubling every two to three days in infections,” UK Health Secretary Sajid Javic told Britain’s Sky News Monday. “That means we’re facing a tidal wave of infection. We’re once again in a race between the vaccine and the virus.” A new study out Monday from researchers at Oxford University adds to evidence that two of the main vaccines deployed against Covid-19 — the AstraZeneca vaccine used widely in Britain and around the world but not in the US,and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine used widely in the US, Europe and elsewhere — won’t protect people as well against the Omicron variant.
