At the point when the Omicron variation of SARS-CoV-2 initially started to spread quickly and outcompete different variations in late 2021, it immediately became clear that the variation was very not the same as those that preceded it.
Not at all like Delta, which arose in December 2020 and was connected to a monstrous flood in hospitalizations and passings last year, Omicron didn't appear to be as hazardous on the size of individual tainted individuals. However clinics, centers, and escalated care units have still topped off with patients as the count of new cases and hospitalizations, presently at more than 145,000 in the US, broke records consistently, in no little part in light of the fact that a progression of changes in the infection's spike protein render immunizations definitely less compelling at halting disease than they have been with past variations. The equal spike in passings that lingered without further ado behind case numbers in different floods is currently beginning to arise.
Meanwhile, record numbers of children are being hospitalized with COVID-19, according to The New York Times, and the number of new infections reported per day continues to skyrocket. On Wednesday (January 12), the 14-day average tally of new daily cases in the US surpassed 780,000.
As Omicron continues to spread, several questions remain about how and why it differs from other variants in terms of both disease outcomes and transmissibility. Some findings, such as clinical reports indicating that Omicron patients fare better than those with other variants and research suggesting that Omicron doesn’t target tissues associated with worse disease outcomes, offer encouraging signs. But whether that makes Omicron “mild” is, experts say, less clear.
“I think it’s pretty clear Omicron causes less severe disease than the Delta variant, but that’s not saying much,” University of Western Australia epidemiologist and biostatistician Zoë Hyde writes in an email to The Scientist. “We know that Delta was more than twice as severe as the original strain, and if Imperial College is right to say that Omicron is about 40-45% less likely to put people in hospital [than Delta was], we’re back to 2020 but with a more contagious strain.”
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