Prof Rudo Mathivha, an intensive care specialist, painted a grim picture from inside Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, in the vast Soweto township on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
“A 15-year-old died this morning. He was a new Covid-19 admission and developed pneumonia,” Prof Mathivha told The Telegraph on Friday. “We shouldn’t be seeing these kinds of numbers this early in the wave.
“We should not be seeing a young child who is moderate to severely symptomatic needing supplementary oxygen or high care intervention. It is this which is worrying me.”
The alpha and delta variants turned out to be more deadly than the original Wuhan virus. We will find out eventually if the same is true of omicron but it will take more data and more time.
The next big news item around omicron will almost certainly centre on its ability or otherwise to evade vaccine-induced antibodies in laboratory tests. Scientists have been working on this in labs around the world for over a week, and we can expect the first results very shortly.
The headlines are unlikely to be good. Most experts think the virus will be able to evade vaccine-induced antibodies in the lab. Indeed, the UK Health Security Agency’s latest risk assessment already puts omicron in the red zone for “vaccine-acquired immunity”, albeit with a low level of confidence.
But as Dr Muge Cevik, an infectious diseases expert at the University of St Andrews, has pointed out, lab tests are far from conclusive as far as human immunity is concerned. Omicron may evade antibodies in test tubes, but vaccine-induced T-cells could still protect us.
“While [antibody] studies will likely give worrying results, once we start to get some real-world studies into how things are doing my guess is that vaccines will still be doing a decent job in protecting people from getting sick,” she said.
The UK is much better vaccinated than South Africa, where just 25 per cent of the population is fully jabbed.
Another positive is that omicron may not spread as quickly when up against delta, the dominant variant in the UK. On the other hand, this may be a forlorn hope if the variant is able to reinfect Britons at the same rate it is reinfecting South Africans.
“If, as appears increasingly likely, omicron can infect people that other variants can’t, then it will grow very quickly,” tweeted Graham Medley, the head of the Government’s SPI-M modelling group on Saturday.
So what does all this mean for Christmas?
If I was forced to bet on it (never a good idea), I would guess that omicron will spread rapidly in the UK but will not, for the most part, cause serious disease in those who are fully vaccinated and boosted.
To put a timeframe on this, I would go with Trevor Bedford, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who calculates that it takes about eight weeks from arrival for omicron to manifest itself as a serious epidemic.
For the UK, that would take us to mid to late January, which avoids Christmas. But, before getting the party hats out, consider two more important facts.
