As families and friends get together to celebrate the holidays, the threat of the omicron variant looms. There isn’t much known about the variant, but what we do know can still be used to prevent outbreaks and save lives. I spoke with Dr. Jeff Elder, Director of Emergency Management at LCMC to get the latest information on Omicron and what the future holds.
There's a University of Hong Kong study that says the omicron variant spreads 70 times faster than the Delta variant. What does that actually mean?
It means that this variant is just much easier to transmit amongst people. How much more transmissible is still being studied. We just know at this point it looks like it's really easy to transmit from person to person. In South Africa, we’re seeing lots of the population test positive for Omicron and the number of cases are going up fast. In the UK, this variant is really overtaking Delta as the predominant strain of coronavirus.
Does the Omicron variant reveal itself in a different way than the Delta variant?
We're getting the early information from South Africa that while the cases go up extremely high, and quickly, but we haven’t seen the same amount of hospitalizations, and that's good news. Maybe this virus won't be as severe as we’ve seen in the previous waves of COVID. The question still is, what population will be affected? Is it mostly young, healthy people or a smattering of everyone? We don't necessarily have all of those answers yet.
What is the likelihood of one being infected with the Omicron variant?
The odds of getting infected, especially if you're around somebody that tests positive, are going up. What people need to do is get vaccinated, get a booster if you’re already vaccinated, and get your kids vaccinated. The early data shows that those boosters may actually give a lot more protection specifically to Omicron.
We’re hearing a lot of COVID vaccine manufacturers say they have boosters every time a new variant reveals itself… I think a lot of folks are now questioning, is this our future now? Will there be one booster after another?
The short term answer is yes. We're going to have to keep the population vaccinated and boosted to kind of get through this acute phase, during which COVID will likely become an endemic virus. That means COVID will be with us for a very long time, but at a much lower level. I think we’re going to see different boosters that look a little different than the previous version, much like we do with flu every year.
If we’re going to have significant adverse reactions to the covid vaccine and boosters, something like that would’ve revealed itself by now, right?
We have a great system in the country for tracking adverse reactions to vaccines. We've seen the overwhelming benefit of vaccination with very few people harmed by vaccination… that's the reason why we continue to push the vaccine’s safety, the amount of lives that we've saved, the amount of hospitalizations and severe illness that we've prevented. There's no doubt that the benefit for both the individual and for the public is vastly weighted to vaccination. We have to continue to stress that information and continue to educate people as to why it's so important to get vaccinated.
