Task force chief Tanja Stadler – “Assume that Omikron will be the most common variant these days”

An assessment of the situation by “NZZ am Sonntag” in the cantons of Geneva, Zurich and Ticino shows that the mutated pathogen Omikron is currently taking over Switzerland for itself. “We assume that Omikron will be the most common variant these days,” says Tanja Stadler, head of the task force.

In Zurich, well over half of the new infections are due to the mutated pathogen Omikron. That’s what the “NZZ am Sonntag” writes. “It can be assumed that Omikron is now dominant in the Zurich area,” says Urs Karrer, Vice-President of the federal Covid-19 scientific task force and head physician for infectious diseases at the Winterthur Cantonal Hospital. At the beginning of the week, the Omikron share in the test centers in the city of Zurich was between 40 and 60.

In Ticino, too, Omikron is already dominant, reports Radio SRF. The increase was rapid: at the beginning of the month, their share was only around 4 percent. The situation in Geneva looks similar: the new variant will be dominant in Geneva before the end of the year, says the Geneva infectiologist Didier Pittet to “NZZ am Sonntag”. “We slide from the fifth wave straight into the sixth wave, without any relaxation in between.” At the moment the Omikron share in the canton in western Switzerland is 30 percent.

It is not a wave, but a wall that is coming our way, said the Geneva virologist Isabella Eckerle recently in “Blick”. The federal corona task force expects up to 25,000 infections per day in January.