New York: When the Omicron Coronavirus variant spreads in South Africa and appears in countries around the world, scientists anxiously watching playing battle that can determine the future of pandemic.
Can the latest competitors to Delta dominate the world to overthrow it? Some scientists, examining data from South Africa and England, suggest omicron can appear winners.
“It’s still the early days, but the more, the data starts to drip, indicating that Omicron is likely to defeat the delta in many, if not all, place,” said Dr.
Jacob Lemieux, who monitored the variant for research collaboration led by Harvard Medical School .
But others say Monday is too early to find out how much the possibility of omicron will spread more efficiently than Delta, or, if yes, how fast it will take over.
“Especially here in the US, where we see a significant wave in Delta, whether Omicron will replace it.
I think we will know in about two weeks,” said Matthew Binnicker, Director of Clinical Virology in Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Many critical questions about Omicron are still not answered, including whether this virus causes a lighter or more severe disease and how much it can avoid immunity from Covid-19 pain or vaccine.
On the problem of deploying, scientists point to what happened in South Africa, where Omicron was first detected.
The omicron speed in infecting people and reaching near dominance in South Africa has a health expert worried that the country at the beginning of a new wave that might come to an extraordinary hospital.
The new variant quickly moved South Africa from a low transmission period, an average of less than 200 new cases per day in mid-November, up to more than 16,000 per day during the weekend.
Omicron accounts for more than 90% of new cases in Gauteng Province, new wave episentrum, according to experts.
This new variant spread rapidly and reached dominance in eight other provinces of South Africa.
“This virus spread very quickly,” said Willem Hanekom, Director of the African Health Research Institute.
“If you see this wave slope that we are at this time, it is a much steep slope than the first three waves experienced by South Africa.
This shows that it spreads quickly and it is probably a very transmitting virus.” But Hanekom, which Also operating with the Covid-19 South African research consortium, said South Africa had a low number of delta cases when Omicron appeared, “I don’t think we can say” Delta compensed.
Scientists say it is not clear whether Omicron will behave in the same way in other countries as it has in South Africa.
Lemieux says there are some instructions on how it can behave; In places like England, who did a lot of order genomes, he said, “we see what seems to be an omicron exponential increase signal over delta.” In the United States, like throughout the world, “there is still a lot of uncertainty,” he said.
“But when you bring together the initial data, you begin to see consistent images arise: that Omicron is already here, and based on what we have observed in South Africa, it is likely to be the dominant tension in a few weeks and the coming month and the possibility of causing waves In the number of cases.
“What does it mean for public health it must still be seen.
Hanekom said the initial data from South Africa showed that the level of reinfection was much higher with Omicron than the previous variant, showing a rather escape virus.
It also shows the virus seems to infect younger people, most of them are not vaccinated, and most cases in hospitals are relatively light.
But Binnicker said things that can play differently in other parts of the world or in different groups of patients.
“It would be very interesting to see what happens when more infections that have the potential to occur in older adults or those who have the underlying health condition,” he said.
“What are the results for those patients?” When the world waits for answers, scientists suggest people do everything they can to protect themselves.
“We want to make sure that people have as many immunity as possible from vaccinations.
So if people are not vaccinated, they must be vaccinated,” said Lemieux.
“If people qualify for booster, they must be a booster, and then do all the other things we know effectively to reduce transmission – masking and keep social and avoid meeting in large rooms, especially without masks.”