Londoners warned of top five Omicron symptoms

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A team of ministers will be meeting on Saturday to assess the current data on Omicron, which one of the senior government officers called “pretty bleak”, according to The Times. According to another government official, the threat of the variant is “potentially pretty terrifying”.

The Imperial College London research, which analysed UK infection data, has raised doubt on the hopes of some experts, that a change in the virulence of the new variant would limit pressure on health systems.

The study further found that Covid booster shots could provide about 85 percent protection against severe illness from Omicron, and more than 90 percent protection against death, 60 days after being administered.

The findings on severity were based on analysis of 120,000 Delta cases and 15,000 suspected Omicron cases, alongside 24 Omicron hospitalisations and more than 1,000 Delta hospitalisations.

The preliminary research suggested people infected with Omicron were as likely to show symptoms and require hospital treatment as Delta patients.

But Prof Azra Ghani, an epidemiologist at Imperial and one of the study’s authors, said the record-breaking infection levels from Omicron could still lead to “a large number of people requiring hospitalisation”.

Ghani said the results demonstrated “the importance of delivering booster doses”.

Without a booster dose, protection against severe disease with Omicron could wane to about 20 percent for those who received the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, and 40 percent for BioNTech/Pfizer by six months after the second dose.

However, the authors found that this was a worst-case scenario and the decline could be reduced by the greater longevity of protection provided by T-cells and B-cells, the immune system’s second line of defence.

By six months after the second dose, two doses of AstraZeneca most likely offer between zero and 5 percent protection against symptomatic infection, and two doses of BioNTech/Pfizer about 20 percent, the research showed, down from about 30 and 60 percent respectively against Delta.

The research also found that Omicron posed a five times greater risk of reinfection compared with the Delta strain.

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This means that the protection against reinfection could be as low as 19 percent, down from 85 percent protection before Omicron hit.

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