This sounds like good news, with all the usual caveats:
South Africa appears to have passed the peak of its omicron variant-driven fourth coronavirus wave, the country’s cabinet announced Thursday, adding that there was only a “marginal increase” in fatalities, which remained low compared to previous spikes.Get the full experience.Choose your plan
The number of infections fell by roughly 30 percent to just under 90,000 for the week ending Dec. 25, down from some 127,000 in the prior corresponding period, government data show. The number of hospital admissions has also been significantly lower over the past 1½ weeks.
The country’s medical system has capacity to provide “routine health services,” authorities said in a statement Thursday, adding that the government would roll back certain pandemic control measures.Story continues below advertisement
The relatively swift passage of the latest South African wave is likely to be keenly watched in many other countries struggling with their own surges in omicron-driven infections. But at least one prominent South African infectious-disease expert has cautioned against extrapolating from the country’s data, given South Africa’s relatively young population. The country is also in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere summer, a time of the year when respiratory illnesses are relatively uncommon.
Nonetheless, the decline in hospital admissions that came “almost in real-time” with the dive in the infection count suggests omicron patients require less medical intervention than those infected with previous versions of the novel coronavirus, said Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Australia.Omicron is the fifth coronavirus variant of concern and is spreading rapidly around the world. Here’s what we know. (Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)
Preliminary studies also have indicated that omicron tends to cause milder disease than the coronavirus wild type and other variants, although experts have warned that its high transmissibility still poses a risk to health-care systems globally.
With that said, all the scientists seem to think that we are in for rough 6-8 weeks in the US. Delta is still here, lots of people are still unvaccinated, it’s winter and people have been travelling and spreading like mad. But it seems pretty clear to me that however bad it is, considering how transmissible it is, we are lucky that Omicron has the milder characteristics it has and that the vaccines are working against it. Maybe that will make up for the other factors that make us more vulnerable.