Doctors and medical experts suspect that the Omicron version really is causing milder COVID-19 than Delta, even if it seems to be spreading faster.
As the Omicron variant sweeps through South Africa, Dr Unben Pillay is seeing dozens of sick patients a day. Yet he hasn’t had to send anyone to the hospital.
And that includes older patients and those with health problems that can make them more vulnerable to becoming severely ill from a coronavirus infection, he said.. All caution that it will take many more weeks to collect enough data to be sure, their observations and the early evidence offer some clues.Only about 30 per cent of those hospitalised with COVID-19 in recent weeks have been seriously ill, less than half the rate as during the first weeks of previous pandemic waves.
“At the moment, virtually everything points toward it being milder disease,” Willem Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Research Institute, said, citing the national institute’s figures and other reports. “It’s early days, and we need to get the final data. Often hospitalisations and deaths happen later, and we are only two weeks into this wave.”
Pillay is a director of an association representing some 5000 general practitioners across South Africa, and his colleagues have documented similar observations about Omicron. Netcare, the largest private healthcare provider, is also reporting less severe cases of COVID-19.