The situation is worsening dramatically in the British capital, London. Because of the rapid spread of the omicron variant, Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a disaster yesterday. In the first London hospitals, personnel have already been shifted to intensive care units and emergency rooms, reports the newspaper “The Guardian”. The number of hospitalized Covid patients has increased by a third in the last week.
At the same time, the Dutch government imposed a tough lockdown on Saturday evening. All shops with the exception of the supermarkets and pharmacies will be closed from today. Also restaurants, bars and discos.
Before contacting Omikron: “Booster must be distributed quickly”(01:39)
Omikron has already been confirmed in 80 countries
It is not surprising that the situation in Europe worsened so shortly before Christmas. Just three weeks after it was sequenced in South Africa, the variant has already been confirmed in around 80 countries. With Omikron, a corona variant is spreading internationally, from which even vaccinated and convalescent people do not have optimal protection.
With the booster vaccination, the antibody level can be raised again to protect against infection, but not to 100 percent according to previous knowledge. Omicron cases are now known in people who have been vaccinated three times.
The dominant variant in Switzerland at the beginning of the year?
The federal scientific task force assumes that Omikron will dominate the infection rate in Switzerland by the beginning of the year at the latest. The latest figures from the canton of Geneva show that the Corona variant currently already accounts for eleven percent of all sequenced samples, explains the Geneva-based epidemiologist Olivia Keizer in an interview with the “Tages-Anzeiger” yesterday.
According to scientists, the Omikron virus variant infects around 70 times faster than Delta. This is due to the fact that this virus settles in the upper respiratory tract of the bronchi, where it also multiplies at an exorbitant rate. At the same time, the disease may be less serious because the omicron does not stick to the lung tissue as strongly. There it replicates about ten times less than the original virus strain. At least this is the result of a new study by Hong Kong University. This could indicate a “lesser severity of the disease”, but in no way means the all-clear.
WHO sees Omikron as a threat
In any case, the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies the threat posed by Omikron as high. The reason is the exponential spread. If more and more people are infected with the new variant at this rate, this is likely to be reflected more frequently in hospital admissions.
Vaccine manufacturers such as Moderna and Biontech / Pfizer are already working on vaccines against the Omikron variant. However, they should not be available until next spring.
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