Covid fight: Case, vaccine data mark small victories China locks down city of 13 million as cases surge globally
There is rush to find out whether Omicron is a more severe variant and if current jabs work against it
LONDON: UK data suggested new Covid variant Omicron may cause proportionally fewer hospital cases than the Delta strain, though public health experts warned the battle against Coviid-19 was far from over.
Coronavirus infections have soared across much of the world as highly infectious Omicron has spread, triggering new restrictions in many countries.
First identified last month in southern Africa and Hong Kong, the variant is quickly becoming dominant in much of western Europe including Britain, where daily new infections have soared beyond 100,000.
But increases in hospitalisations and deaths in South Africa and Britain since Omicron took hold appear to have been more gradual, and Novavax has joined other vaccine manufacturers in saying its shots protect against it.
University of Edinburgh researchers who tracked 22,205 Omicron patients said on Wednesday the number who needed to be hospitalised was 68% lower than they would have expected, based on the rate in patients with Delta.
Imperial College London researchers said they saw evidence over the last two weeks of a 40-45% reduction in the risk of hospitalisation for Omicron relative to Delta.
Raghib Ali, senior clinical research associate at the University of Cambridge, said scientists had warned that, with the surge in UK cases, even a small proportion of hospitalisations could overwhelm the heathcare system.
However, the UK data was encouraging and “may help justify the government’s decision not to expand restrictions on social gathering over Christmas in England”, he said.
On Wednesday, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, Maria van Kerkhove, had said data on Omicron was still too “messy” to draw firm conclusions.
Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine is effective in generating an immune response against the Omicron variant, and an additional booster dose produces further immune resistance to the new variant, according to early data published on Wednesday.
Novavax said the data was taken from its ongoing studies of its vaccine’s effectiveness in adolescents and as a booster.
BEIJING: The city of Xian in northwest China’s Shaanxi province with some 13 million residents went into a lockdown on Thursday following the detection of 234 Covid-19 cases since December 9.
All residents have been ordered to stay indoors, communities have been put under “closed management”, and outgoing transport including trains and flights have been cancelled, health authorities said on Thursday as the city started the third round of nucleic acid testing for all residents.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases at 234 is low for a big city but given China’s “zero-Covid” policy, the lockdown is likely to be strictly implemented.
Yang Zhanqiu, a deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told the tabloid Global Times the key reason for the lockdown “lies in the scale of community transmission in Xian and unclear epidemiological routes - the outbreak has demonstrated at least three transmission chains”. No infection caused by the Omicron variant has been detected in Xian.
The local outbreak, according to the tabloid, has spilled over to at least four other cities, including Yanan and Xianyang in Shaanxi province, Dongguan in south China’s Guangdong province, and Beijing.
Europe has been hit hard by the ongoing surge, recording 60% of global cases over the past week, according to an AFP tally from official sources on Wednesday.
The Omicron coronavirus variant is spreading rapidly in Italy, the National Health Institute (ISS) said on Thursday, releasing preliminary data of a flash-survey showing it accounted for 28% of cases on December 20. The previous survey showed Omicron in just 0.19% of cases on December 6.