Omicron coronavirus variant may be less severe, but don’t call it ‘mild’, says WHO
- The UN health agency’s director general warns that like previous variants, the mutated strain is still hospitalising and killing people
- A record 9.5 million Covid-19 cases were tallied over the last week, a 71 per cent increase from the previous seven-day period, though deaths were down
The more infectious Omicron variant of Covid-19 appears to produce less severe disease than the globally dominant Delta strain, but should not be categorised as “mild”, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Thursday.
Janet Diaz, WHO lead on clinical management, said early studies showed there was a reduced risk of hospitalisation from the variant first identified in southern Africa and Hong Kong in November compared with Delta.
There appears also to be a reduced risk of severity in both younger and older people, she told a media briefing from WHO headquarters in Geneva.
The remarks on the reduced risks of severe disease chime with other data, including studies from South Africa and England, although she did not give further details about the studies or ages of the cases analysed.
The impact on the elderly is one of the big unanswered questions about the new variant as most of the cases studied so far have been in younger people.
