Doctors hope Omicron causes milder cases of Covid — but it’s still too early to say
Physicians around the world have suggested
the Omicron variant may cause milder illness than other forms of the coronavirus. But actually understanding Omicron’s severity is an open question, experts caution — one that requires more patient data and more time to answer.
There is a normal range in symptoms among people infected by the coronavirus, from none to severe, so it takes a large set of people to get the full picture.
“I don’t think right now there’s any reason to expect that this virus is less or more severe than any other circulating variants,” said vaccinologist Florian Krammer of Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “The base assumption that we should have is that it behaves like other SARS-CoV-2 variants and we need to figure out, over time, if it’s more severe, if it’s less severe. But to assume right now that it might be attenuated in some kind of way I think would be problematic.”
Notably, many of the Omicron cases reported in South Africa have been in younger people, so it’s not clear how the virus will behave if it infects people with health conditions or older adults. Many of the other cases have been identified in travelers, and as Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University, noted, that means those people were feeling well enough to get on a plane.
“Since there haven’t been that many cases, and they’re only now being identified, that’s going to be one thing that limits our ability to make general statements,” Dean said.
So far, the rising hospitalization count in South Africa — particularly in Gauteng province, which has had the largest Omicron outbreak — matches the proportion of people hospitalized in past waves,
the Wall Street Journal reported. Joe Phaahla, South Africa’s health minister, has also said that the majority of hospital admissions continue to be among people who were not vaccinated, a hopeful sign that the shots are maintaining their protection.
There is another possible reason Omicron infections might be milder in more people: The hosts the virus is infecting — meaning people — are better equipped to fend it off and minimize its damage.
South Africa has had several massive Covid-19 waves, so, combined with vaccination, there’s lots of existing immunity in the population. If many of the people doctors are seeing now were previously infected, that remaining immunity could protect them from developing serious disease even if it couldn’t block the infection. In fact, if that winds up partially explaining why some of these infections appear milder, that would be a good sign that immune protection can stand up to this variant to at least some extent. It wouldn’t answer, however, how severe the virus is in people who remain unprotected either because they haven’t been infected previously or immunized.
Actually understanding Omicron's severity is an open question, experts caution — one that requires more patient data and more time to answer.
www.statnews.com