New Delhi: Adrian Pooran, Acting Executive Director of South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), has said that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus found in southern Africa may be most likely to displace the highly infectious Delta variant.
“We thought what would beat Delta? That’s always been the question, at least in terms of transmissibility, … maybe it’s the special edition variant,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Puran said in an interview earlier on Tuesday that scientists should know within four weeks to what extent Omicron can ward off immunity generated by vaccines or prior infection, and whether it causes worse clinical symptoms than other types. leads to.
However, NICD’s acting executive director of South Africa said it was too early to say whether Omicron was displacing the delta in South Africa because local scientists have so far produced only 87 sequences of Omicron.
Omicron, which is expected to trigger the fourth wave, could lead to a sharp increase in infections if it proves to be even more permeable than the delta version.
Meanwhile, Anne von Gottberg, a clinical microbiologist at the NICD, said it looks like infections are increasing across the country.
As an area of concern, the presentation of NICD on Monday flagged the large number of Covid-19 admissions among infants below two years of age.
“It seems that in fact some of those penetrations may have started before the emergence of Omicron. We are also seeing that there was an increase in influenza cases in the last month or two and so we need to look at other respiratory infections.” You need to be really careful,” Gottberg said.
“We’re looking at the data very carefully, but at the moment I’m not sure we can definitively link it to Omicron,” he said.
South Africa, which reported nearly three million COVID-19 infections and more than 89,000 deaths during the pandemic, has been lauded for quickly alerting the global scientific community and the World Health Organization (WHO) to omicrons.
Anecdotes from doctors treating South African Covid-19 patients say that Omicron causes mild symptoms, including dry cough, fever and night sweats.
However, experts caution against drawing firm conclusions.
The WHO warned earlier on Monday that Omicron poses “very high” risks globally.
It stressed that there remains uncertainty about how contagious and dangerous the strain was, AFP reported.
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