‘Omi milder than Delta’

‘Real world’ study results

Omicron appears to be a milder version of COVID-19 than the Delta variant, a leaked study from the British government shows.

The Health Security Agency, Britain’s equivalent to America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that those who fall ill with Omicron are less likely to become severely sick compared with those who get the Delta variant, according to the data obtained by Politico.

The early real-world data, which is expected to be released before Saturday, found that Omicron is likely to bring on a mild illness in most people.

The results are likely because of the large number of people who have been vaccinated and previously infected, and because Omicron is naturally milder than other variants, the study said.

However, the UK agency warned that the data showed that the mildness of Omicron wasn’t enough to prevent large numbers of hospitalizations.

Those who do become severely ill with Omicron are still at risk of hospitalization and death, the data found.

But scientists also found that a booster dose of the vaccine significantly reduces the chance of developing symptoms and being hospitalized with Omicron.

The agency would not comment on the study Wednesday, prior to its release.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 cases in South Africa, where scientists first alerted the world to the now-raging Omicron variant last month, appears to have peaked, the country’s top infectious disease expert said Wednesday.

Salim Abdool Karim, who is heading up South Africa’s pandemic response, told The Washington Post the nation of 59 million has seemingly passed its peak of new Omicron cases and expects to see the “same trajectory” play out in almost every other country across the globe.

“If previous variants caused waves shaped like Kilimanjaro, Omicron’s is more like we were scaling the north face of Everest,” Karim told the newspaper in reference to South Africa’s sharp rise in cases during the first weeks of December.

“Now we’re going down, right back down, the south face,” Karim continued.

“And . . . perhaps [that is] what we’ll see with subsequent variants at this stage of the pandemic.”

The sharp peak in cases and the variant’s lower risk of severe illness or death may be attributed to more than 70 percent of South Africans having been infected by earlier strains, likely leading to a stronger antibody response, Karim said.