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The first real-world study of how vaccines hold up against the Omicron variant has shown a significant decrease in protection against symptomatic cases caused by the new, fast-spreading form of the coronavirus.
But work Released Friday by British government scientists, also noted that the third vaccine doses provided a significant defense against Omicron.
Government scientists also Offered the most complete view ever He warned of how quickly Omicron is spreading in the UK’s highly vaccinated population, warning that the variant could cross the Delta by mid-December, causing an increase in Covid-19 cases without any action being taken.
The scientists found that four months after humans received a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the vaccines were roughly 35 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections caused by Omicron, with a significant decrease in their performance against the Delta variant.
Yet the third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine brought the figure to roughly 75 percent.
Two doses of AstraZeneca vaccine appeared to provide almost no protection against symptomatic infection by Omicron several months after vaccination. But for those buyers, an additional dose of Pfizer-BioNTech paid huge dividends, increasing efficacy against the variant to 71 percent.
Still, the study’s authors said they expect the vaccines to remain a bulwark against hospitalizations and deaths, even without infections caused by Omicron. The researchers cautioned that it is too soon to know exactly how well the vaccines will perform, even in a country tracking the variant as closely as the UK.
This study is published along with new findings on how easily Omicron manages to spread. The UK Health Safety Agency reported that someone infected with the Omicron variant, for example, is roughly three times more likely than someone infected with the Delta variant to transmit the virus to other members of the household.
And close contact of an Omicron case is roughly twice as likely than close contact with someone infected with Delta to contract the virus.
Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, said Omicron’s ability to evade the body’s immune defenses accounts for most of its advantage over previous variants. But modeling work by the research team and other groups in the UK also suggested that Omicron was roughly 25 to 50 percent more contagious than Delta.
Dr. “I think there’s a significant amount of immune evasion,” Ferguson said, referring to the virus’s ability to circumvent the body’s defenses. “But it’s also more naturally contagious than Delta.”
He and other scientists warned that the evidence is still coming and that better surveillance could impact their findings where the Omicron wave is most advanced.
The World Health Organization said this week that some evidence is emerging that Omicron causes milder illness than Delta, but it’s too soon to be conclusive. Yet scientists have warned that if the variant continues to spread as quickly as in the UK, where cases are doubling every 2.5 days, healthcare systems around the world could be flooded with patients.
Even though Omicron causes severe disease in only half the rate of the Delta variant, Dr. Ferguson said computer modeling has suggested that at the height of the Omicron wave, 5,000 people could be admitted to hospitals daily in England at the height of the Omicron wave – a figure higher than anything currently seen. another point in the pandemic.
Widespread vaccination in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States would prevent as many people from dying as in previous waves, the scientists said. But experts also warned that patients with Covid and other illnesses would suffer if hospitals were too full.
Dr. “It only takes a small reduction in protection against serious illness for these large numbers of infections to grow to levels of hospitalization we can’t handle,” Ferguson said.
It will take several weeks to understand how the current increase in Omicron infections could translate into people needing hospital care. Dr. “I worry that once we know about the violence, it may be too late to take action,” Ferguson said.
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