“It is extremely unlikely this variant will evade vaccines completely,” said Prof Peter Openshaw of Imperial College London. If previous questions raised fairly worrying responses from scientists, most are more optimistic about the power of jabs to safeguard people from Omicron. But decreased T-cell immunity cannot be excluded as a possible contributory factor.” If the power of previous infection to protect people is reduced, how might vaccines fare against the variant? “There is no indication as to how this immune evasion happens, although it can be presumed to be because of decreased antibody binding to Omicron’s mutated spike protein. This point was backed by Simon Clarke of Reading University. These make it more difficult for antibodies to neutralise the virus.” “That is pretty clear and was anticipated from the mutational changes we have pinpointed in its protein structure. “From what we have learned so far, we can be fairly confident that – compared with other variants – Omicron tends to be better able to reinfect people who have been previously infected and received some protection against Covid-19,” said Prof Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London. Evidence indicates that Omicron has an advantage over other variants in bypassing the immune system. How easily does the variant evade the body’s anti-virus defences? Scientists are now carefully monitoring Omicron cases to determine how swiftly the variant is affecting the population of Britain. When the Delta variant began its rapid spread in the UK, case numbers doubled roughly every five days. “That’s a huge advantage for the virus - but not for us,” he told the journal Nature. Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, estimates that Omicron can infect three to six times as many people as Delta, over the same time period. South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Johannesburg confirmed that Omicron is spreading quickly.
In mid-November, only a few hundred cases were noted. On 1 December, the country recorded 8,561 cases compared with a total of 3,402 reported on 26 November. Omicron has spread rapidly in South Africa, to the alarm of researchers worldwide. On Friday, the UK Health Security Agency announced that 75 more cases of the Covid-19 Omicron variant had been identified in England, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 104.Īs a result of Omicron, many nations that were already suffering from soaring numbers of Covid-19 cases caused by the Delta variant have imposed new lockdown measures and travel restrictions. The US and Australia have become the latest countries to confirm locally transmitted – as opposed to imported – cases of the variant. The Omicron variant has now been detected in 38 countries, although no deaths have yet been reported in any of these nations, according to the World Health Organization.
0 kommentar(er)
