Covid-19: Omicron wave heads for UK, but it’s not clear how bad it’ll be

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LONDON — With cases of the Omicron variant doubling every three days and the government doing an about-face on restrictions it had long resisted, Britain is bracing for a new coronavirus surge, unsure if it will be a relatively minor event or a return to the dark days of earlier pandemic waves.

So far, the number of Omicron cases — 817 confirmed by Thursday, though officials say the real figure is likely much higher — is small compared with the daily average of 48,000 new coronavirus cases overall.

It also has one of the world’s most robust systems for sequencing viral genomes, so it can identify and track new variants earlier and more thoroughly than countries. “We haven’t seen that kind of rate of growth since I think the March 2020 time when the original virus was spreading in a totally naïve population, when none of us really knew anything about it,” he said.

The WHO chief, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, acknowledged that there was some evidence that Omicron caused milder illness than Delta, though it was too early to be definitive. Analysis of the data collected in Britain showed increased household transmission risk, a key indicator of how fast the variant can spread. The health agency cautioned that the data was still sparse and the conclusions tentative, with deeper studies underway. But Britain’s genomic sequencing system offers some of the strongest evidence yet on the variant.

 

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