Prof Tim Spector, from the , said that in about 10 days’ time the UK could have more cases of Omicron than some countries it had put on the travel red list.
The professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London told BBC Breakfast: “The official estimates are about 350-odd Omicron cases, and because the current testing is missing a lot of those, it’s probably at least 1,000 to 2,000 I would guess at the moment.
“And we are expecting this to be doubling about every two days at the moment, so if you do your maths – say, assumed it’s 1,000 at the moment, and you think it’s going to be doubling every two days, you can see that those numbers are going to be pretty (high) certainly in about 10 days’ time. By that time, we’ll probably have more cases than they will in some of those African countries.
“So I think these travel restrictions do perhaps have their place initially, when cases are really low here and really high in the other country, but when we reach that equilibrium, there’s very little point in having them in my opinion.”
PA Media quotes him saying that data from the Zoe symptom study app suggests that about half of all cases at the moment of Delta are being “missed” because they are not presenting with “classic” Covid symptoms of fever, new and persistent cough and a loss or change of smell or taste.
“Omicron is probably more, much more similar to the mild variants we’re seeing in people who have been vaccinated with Delta than anything else,” he said.
“And so it is going to be producing cold-like symptoms that people won’t recognise as Covid if they just believe the official government advice.”
Here’s a reminder of England’s current travel restriction red list.
With the caveat that until scientists get more data, there is a lot of speculation around, but Dr Jeffrey Barrett, director of the Covid-19 genomics initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, has agreed this morning with those suggesting that Omicron would take over from Delta in the UK as the dominant variant of coronavirus “within a matter of weeks”.
PA Media quotes him telling the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “I think we can now say that this variant is spreading faster in the UK than the Delta variant at the same time, and that’s something that I think was unclear until very recently. I am pretty confident that it’s going to take over probably in a matter of weeks.”
Asked about the implications of that, he said: “Well, we don’t know and that’s the really critical question, of course, is how many of those cases of which there will likely be a large number will lead to severe disease?
“And a number of people including Dr Fauci have hypothesised that this variant may be more mild or less likely to cause severe disease than previous variants of the virus.
“I think what we have seen so far in South Africa, for example, is possibly consistent with that, but it’s really much too soon to say, and the reason for that is that this variant seems to be able to infect individuals who either have been vaccinated or previously have been infected.
“And we know that second infections or breakthrough infections of vaccinated individuals tend to be more mild. So the fact that so far we have seen not very many severe cases of Omicron, maybe because it is infecting these individuals with some amount of immunity and that’s good news that they aren’t having tonnes of severe disease, but I think it is too soon to assume that fundamentally Omicron is more mild than say Delta.”
A quick one from Reuters here which sounds like good news. Britain’s GSK has released new data from early-stage studies, citing that its antibody-based Covid-19 therapy with US partner Vir is effective against all mutations of the new Omicron coronavirus variant.
The data, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, shows that the companies’ treatment, sotrovimab, is effective against all 37 identified mutations to date in the spike protein, GSK said in a statement.
