Stay calm – Britain is nothing like South Africa

Different countries have varying experiences of Covid, its variants and vaccines, experts say

‘I’m kind of calmed by the real-life on-theground data as it looks like even in South Africa, vaccines are holding up against it’

What it means in short is that it is impossible to take data from south Africa and expect it to play out in Britain

ALARMING new data from South Africa suggests that the omicron variant could more than double the risk of being reinfected with coronavirus, leading predictably to calls for tough restrictions to be brought in to stop the spread in Britain.

Researchers from Witwatersrand and Stellenbosch universities found that reinfections increased substantially between Nov 1 and 27, just at the time when omicron was gaining a foothold.

Compared to the original Wuhan strain, there was a 2.39 times greater risk of catching the virus again, suggesting it is dodging immunity. So far, so scary. Yet this data might not be the smoking gun it first seems. For a start, the authors made the surprising discovery that in South Africa there was a drop in reinfections of about 30 per cent after Delta became dominant.

The findings are entirely at odds with data published just this week from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which found people in England had a 36 per cent reduced chance of a reinfection under Alpha, with secondary cases rising as Delta took hold.

It is a good indication that variants are not playing out the same way in different countries.

This is likely to be caused by a number of factors, such as population age, vaccination uptake and different immunity profiles caused by which variants have been dominant.

For example, South Africa has a far younger population than Britain, with an average age of 27, compared to 40 in the UK.

ONS data shows that reinfections are more likely to occur in people who had a mild bout the first time round.

Early anecdotal data from doctors suggest most omicron cases are mild, which is what would be expected in younger, fitter populations. Undoubtedly, the omicron variant looks nasty with its dozens of mutations many of which are associated with immune escape and extra transmissibility.

And infection numbers are causing concern in South Africa. Cases in Gauteng, the country’s most populous province, have increased by 375 per cent week on week, while hospital admissions have risen 4.2 per cent and deaths by 28.6 per cent.

It is worth remembering that South Africa has poor vaccine coverage. Just one quarter of the population has had two doses, compared to nearly 70 per cent in Britain.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases said this week that 87 per cent of hospitalised cases in South Africa were unvaccinated.

Dr Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health, of the University of Southampton, said: “The immune response from vaccination is much stronger when compared with infection-acquired immunity. Whilst there is likely to be some impact, it is likely vaccines will still provide some level of protection.”

High vaccination uptake in Britain, coupled with high infection rates may mean the virus has fewer places to go. Francois Balloux, director and professor of computational systems biology, at University College London, said: “South Africa has a low vaccination rate but a large proportion of the population has been infected during previous Covid-19 waves. The population of South Africa also tends to be fairly young with a median age of 27.6 years.

“As such, the results from this study are not directly portable to other settings such as Europe or North America and more data will be needed before we can make any more robust prediction about the potential threat posed by a global spread of the omicron variant in different parts of the world.”

Research from Imperial College is also showing that people become “imprinted” with a specific immune profile after encountering coronavirus, its variants and the vaccines, and this dictates how they fight off new variants.

It suggests that in countries like South Africa which have encountered different variants and have lower vaccine uptake than Britain, immunity of the population will not be the same.

Yesterday, Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, said: “I was one of the people who was quite fast to say I was terrified by the mutations. And I’m still kind of terrified by them. But I’m also kind of calmed by the real-life on-theground data as it looks like even in South Africa, with low vaccination uptake, vaccines are holding up to some extent against it.

“What it means for this county, is I think we can calm down, the jury’s out. We’ve got a high level of vaccination and a backdrop of delta.”

Rosemary Boyton, professor of immunology and respiratory medicine, at Imperial said:: “Most of us in the UK will have been imprinted by either the original infection or through two or three doses of vaccination or the Alpha or Delta variant.

“If we travel to Africa, or South Africa or Brazil, you’ll see populations who have been exposed to different waves of infection, so they’ll again be imprinted differently.”

What it all means in short, is that it is impossible to take data from South Africa and expect it to play out in Britain. We have very low levels of omicron in Britain with even Sage scientists admitting that cases have not been increasing substantially.

Let’s keep calm and carry on until there really is something to panic about.