UK case data, vaccine effectiveness marks small wins in battle of Omicron

[ad_1]

London:

Two vaccine makers said their injections offered protection against Omicron, as UK data suggested it could cause proportionately fewer hospitalizations than the Delta coronavirus variant, corroborating findings in South Africa.

Coronavirus infections have skyrocketed across much of the world as the highly infectious Omicron has spread, triggering new brakes in many countries. World Health Organization officials, however, said it was too early to draw firm conclusions about its virulence.

First identified last month in southern Africa and Hong Kong, the variant is quickly becoming dominant across much of western Europe, including Britain, where daily infections have exceeded 100,000.

Preliminary data had indicated that Omicron was more resistant to vaccines developed before its emergence. But the increase in hospitalizations and deaths in Britain since Omicron’s implantation has been more gradual, researchers said.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh who followed 22,205 patients infected with Omicron said on Wednesday evening that the number of patients who needed to be hospitalized was 68% lower than they would have expected, based on the patient rate with Delta.

Researchers at Imperial College London said they saw evidence over the past two weeks of a 40% to 45% reduction in the risk of hospitalization for Omicron compared to Delta.

Raghib Ali, senior clinical research associate at Cambridge University, said scientists have warned that with increasing cases in the UK, even a small proportion of hospitalizations could overwhelm the healthcare system.

However, the UK data was encouraging and “could help justify the government’s decision not to extend restrictions on social gatherings at Christmas in England,” he said.

AstraZeneca, meanwhile, said on Thursday that a three-treatment dose of its COVID-19 vaccine offered protection against the variant, citing data from a University of Oxford laboratory study.

The study’s results, which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, match those of competitors Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

The study on AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Vaxzevria, showed that after a three-dose cycle, neutralization levels against Omicron were broadly similar to those against Delta after two doses.

Hours earlier, Novavax Inc said the first data showed that its vaccine – which is cleared for use this week by European Union and WHO regulators but has yet to be approved by states – United – also generated an immune response against Omicron.

DELTA STILL ALSO SPREADING

As financial markets welcomed signs that Omicron may be less onerous than expected, global equities extended their rally on Thursday as bonds and safe-haven currencies eased.

Beyond Western Europe, the Delta variant continued to spread.

The coronavirus death toll in Russia, where officials said this week only detected 41 Omicron cases, topped 600,000 on Thursday, Reuters calculations based on official data showed after a wave Delta-related infections.

Only the United States and Brazil have recorded more deaths from coronaviruses.

The Chinese city of Xian, where no case of Omicron has been detected, has put its 13 million residents in lockdown as the daily number of nationally transmitted COVID-19 infections increases for the sixth day in a row .

UK hospitalization data was supported by a study released on Wednesday by the South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD).

But NICD researchers have included several caveats.

“It is difficult to disentangle the relative contribution of the high levels of immunity of the previous population versus lower intrinsic virulence at the lower severity of disease observed,” they wrote.

WHO COVID-19 technical officer Maria van Kerkhove also said the UN agency did not have enough data to draw firm conclusions. The data on Omicron was still “messy,” she said at a briefing in Geneva on Wednesday.

Global Coronavirus Spread Interactive Chart: Open https://tmsnrt.rs/2FThSv7 in an external browser.

(This story was not edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

[ad_2]