True dangers of latest variant won’t be known for weeks, says medic
ONE of Wales’s leading doctors says NHS staff may have to “pull out all the stops” to tackle the new Omicron strain of coronavirus.
Dr Meng Khaw, executive medical director at Public Health Wales, said officials are carefully monitoring how the strain affects people’s health as it spreads across the globe.
He admitted the number of mutations on the variant’s spike protein was of great concern as it had the potential to evade or limit the effectiveness of current vaccines.
But he said the true dangers of the mutant variant would not be fully realised until more analysis was carried out in countries where it first emerged towards the start of November.
“My understanding is that there are over 100 cases now in South Africa. That gives us the ability to do some analysis on what’s happening with hospital admissions and mortality as well,” explained Dr Khaw.
“So over the coming days and weeks we will have more information emerging from those countries where we have identified cases.”
The World Health Organization designated the Omicron strain as “a variant of concern” on Friday, November 26, because of how easily it was spreading and how it behaved.
There have been 22 confirmed cases in the UK but many more are under investigation. There are still no confirmed cases in Wales.
Dr Khaw said he “didn’t have a crystal ball” to predict whether Wales would soon see cases but stressed measures were in place to monitor people who were returning to Wales from countries affected by the variant.
“We’re continuing to investigate the returning travellers from the affected countries and following them up,” he added.
“And I understand the team that’s actively doing this has been able to follow up most of the people arriving within the 10 days before departing from the affected country.
“We can then assure ourselves that we haven’t imported Omicron from those countries.”
Dr Khaw added he was in “no doubt” that Omicron was transmitting “quite rapidly” across communities in southern Africa.
“What we don’t have information on is how severely it’s impacting on people who have the infection, which means that the control measures we have in place through face coverings, hand-washing and also keeping a safe space between people, remain very, very important measures for us,” he said.
When asked whether it was inevitable that Omicron would become the dominant strain in Wales, overtaking Delta which has been ever present this year, Dr Khaw said: “We’ve seen variants come and go, haven’t we? This time last year we
were in the wake of the Alpha variant, which was first identified in the UK, and now we have no cases of the Alpha variant.
“So I think these variants as they emerge, they will potentially out-compete other strains, but let’s not forget the transmission in southern Africa was on the back of very few daily cases in the country and so we don’t have any clear evidence that it might out-compete the Delta variant but we are keeping a very close watch on it.”
With the assumption that Covid jabs are protecting against this variant, Dr Khaw said it was vital to improve the vaccination uptake and the rollout of the booster vaccine.
The Welsh Government has implemented advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) that all adults aged 18 to 39 should be offered a booster dose in order of descending age groups. Those aged 40 and over are already eligible for a booster vaccine.
In further advice from the JCVI, children aged 12 to 15 are being offered a second dose of the Pfizer/biontech Covid19
vaccine no sooner than 12 weeks after their first dose.
“Clearly we also need to understand the impact [of Omicron] on unvaccinated individuals and those that are vaccinated and that picture will emerge very soon,” Dr Khaw added.
“I hope we’re not in the situation that we were last year when our Christmas celebrations were heavily impacted. But, again, I really don’t have a sense of how Omicron is going to transmit across the UK over the coming days.”
Dr Khaw said that Wales’s pathogen genomics unit had a “world-class” service that offered “a very quick turnaround” to get genomic sequencing for cases of Covid.
He added that he was greatly encouraged by the recent fall in seven-day infection rates across Wales.
“I’d like to say thank you to people working on the frontline of the coronavirus response for all that you’ve done. You’ve worked so well with each other to fight this virus,” he concluded.
“And I know that the Omicron variant is yet another indication that we might have to pull out all the stops again.”