As the omicron blaze is soaring in Europe, it is starting to fade away in South Africa, where it has been identified. The seven-day rolling average of the number of new contaminations has seen a continuous decline for more than a week, which suggests to the Washington post than “The wave of omicron cases seems to calm down as quickly as it has formed”.
The new variant was detected on November 9 in Botswana before spreading at a phenomenal rate in neighboring South Africa, and more particularly in Gauteng. In this province alone, where the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, the capital, are located, on 12 December there were no less than 16,000 new infections. On Tuesday, this figure fell to 3,300. A reassuring finding while scientists believe that this mutation of the virus is at least twice as contagious as the delta variant.
Could such a decline occur in Europe, where the number of new daily cases is exploding again and even breaking records, especially in the United Kingdom, where 106,000 infections were recorded on Wednesday? According to epidemiologist Antoine Flahault, interviewed by West France, it’s unlikely. He notes that in South Africa, the omicron variant arrived in the middle of summer. “It is therefore an additional brake which helps in the fight against this wave in the country”, he recalls.
70% already infected with a previous variant
Another variable must be taken into account to explain this sudden drop in the number of cases. As the South African epidemiology professor Salim Abdool Karim notes in the Washington post, “More than 70% of South Africans have already been infected with a previous variant. Probably resulting in a more robust immune response in a large part of the population ”.
The fact that relatively few severe forms of the disease have been developed can also be explained by this reason, as well as by the youth of the population of this country of 59 million people. But also, according to several studies, because the omicron variant is inherently less virulent than the delta. The South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases thus estimates that the probability of developing a severe form of Covid with the version of the virus currently circulating would be 70% lower.