The new COVID-19 is not the same as the old COVID-19, according to John Bell, a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford and the U.K. government’s life sciences adviser.
“The incidence of severe disease and death from this disease has basically not changed since we all got vaccinated and that’s really important to remember,” he said Tuesday on BBC Radio 4. “The horrific scenes that we saw a year ago — intensive care units being full, lots of people dying prematurely — that is now history in my view and I think we should be reassured that that’s likely to continue.”
On the new Omicron variant that is now spreading, he said: “The disease does appear to be less severe, and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital. They don’t need high-flow oxygen, average length of stay is apparently three days, this is not the same disease as we were seeing a year ago.”
Researchers for a new study also say Omicron appears to be milder than the Delta variant, leading to up to 80% fewer hospitalizations.
Of the people who contract the virus and are hospitalized, they’re also 70% less likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit or be put on a ventilator compared to those with Delta, The Daily Mail reported on the study led by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD).
“So even though cases of omicron were less likely to end up in hospital than cases of delta, it is not possible to say whether this is due to inherent differences in virulence or whether this is due to higher population immunity in November compared to earlier in the year,” Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, told the Mail.
Another study found much of the same. “A separate study out of Scotland, by scientists at the University of Edinburgh and other experts, suggested the risk of hospitalization was two-thirds less with omicron than delta. But that study pointed out that the nearly 24,000 omicron cases in Scotland were predominantly among younger adults ages 20-39. Younger people are much less likely to develop severe cases of COVID-19,” the Associated Press reported.
“This national investigation is one of the first to show that Omicron is less likely to result in COVID-19 hospitalization than Delta,” researchers wrote, the AP said. While the findings are drawn from early data, “they are encouraging,” the authors wrote.
Meanwhile, according to a report from the British government, which will release the early data in the coming days, the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is milder than the Delta variant.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which operates much like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that those who contract Omicron are less likely to become severely ill compared to people who get the Delta variant, according to the data, Politico reported.
“More people are likely to have a mild illness with less serious symptoms — probably in part due to Britain’s large number of vaccinated and previously infected people, and possibly because Omicron may be intrinsically milder,” Politico reported. “Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has previously cautioned against too much optimism based on the initial optimistic signs from South Africa in the past few weeks. However, the UKHSA’s view after studying cases in Britain is that Omicron is indeed usually less severe than Delta.”
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected].