Omicron 3 times more contagious than Delta! First study with frightening result!

This is all the news I need. In the middle of the rising Corona numbers, a new study reports frightening results regarding the danger of Omikron!

According to a preliminary study from South Africa, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is three times more likely to re-infect compared to the Delta or Beta strains. The paper is based on data collected by the South African health system and was uploaded to a so-called preprint server on Thursday. That means it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

By the end of November, there were 35,670 suspected cases of re-infection among 2.8 million people who tested positive, according to the paper. The cases were considered so-called reinfections if they tested positive for the coronavirus again 90 days after the first infection.

South African epidemiologist Juliet Pulliam said on Twitter that most of those re-infected had contracted the Delta variant for the first time. However, she said there were also patients from previous waves of infection. Pulliam is director of South Africa’s DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis research centre.

Pulliam pointed out that the authors did not have information on the vaccination status of the patients. Therefore, they could not assess the extent to which the Omikron variant bypasses vaccinations. The researchers plan to investigate this next. In addition, data on the severity of illness in Omikron-infected people would be “urgently” needed.

Michael Head, of the University of Southampton praised the research as “high quality”. He said the analysis “seems very worrying because immunity from previous infections can be bypassed relatively easily.” It appeared “increasingly unlikely” that reports of higher contagiousness from the new variant were a “false alarm”.

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Earlier, infectiologist Anne von Gottberg of South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) told a World Health Organization (WHO) news conference that surviving a Corona infection did not protect against infection with the new Omicron variant. “However, we believe that the vaccines still protect against severe disease,” she added.

The number of Corona infections in South Africa has jumped in recent days. On Wednesday, the country reported 8,561 new cases, up from 4,373 the previous day and 2,273 on Monday.