A leading immunologist on Tuesday said the omicron coronavirus variant is not the same as the ones witnessed last year and that the new strain “appears to be less severe.”
Sir John Bell, a regius professor at the University of Oxford and a life sciences advisor for the government, said that despite the increase in case numbers and the number of people being admitted to hospital, the omicron variant appeared to be less severe and resulted in shorter hospital stays in comparison to previous mutations.
“Omicron is not the same disease we were seeing a year ago,” Bell said in remarks reported by the Guardian. The senior scientist also said that deaths have remained low in proportion to infection rates.
Bell argued that fewer patients infected with the omicron variant were in need of high-flow oxygen and that the average length of stay in hospital was reduced to three days.
Despite Bell’s assurances, many scientists have criticized the government’s failure to implement stricter restrictions and have argued that while omicron appears to be less severe, it is still highly transmissible and without government intervention, the NHS could face a breakdown due to overwhelming numbers of patients.
Furthermore, staff absences in the NHS caused by self-isolation are putting a heavy strain on health and emergency services which are already under a lot of pressure since the start of the pandemic over two years ago.
“We’re now seeing a significant increase in the level of staff absences, and quite a few of our chief executives are saying that they think that that’s probably going to be a bigger problem and a bigger challenge for them than necessarily the number of people coming in who need treatment because of Covid,” said Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers.
Last week, early analysis in South Africa and the UK should that the omicron variant was less severe than the delta variant and had a lower risk of hospitalization when compared to the latter. Furthermore, the study revealed that despite its high transmissibility, it developed less severe symptoms.
Health experts have warned, however, that milder variants will still cause infections to increase which will inevitably result in higher hospital admissions./aa
