Omicron COVID variant spreading

 

The international monetary fund IMF is warning that the new omicron coronavirus variant is likely to delay the global economic recovery from the pandemic. The fund is expecting to downgrade its forecasts for world growth this year and next year. That's even though the world

health organization WHO says it has no evidence yet of any deaths connected to omicron. The new variant is spreading rapidly in many countries. South Africa in particular is seeing an alarming wave of infections more young children are being hospitalized and authorities are concerned that people who've already had covid19 are being re-infected healthcare workers in south Africa, have had their hands full since scientists there first detected the omicron variant last week and it's been found across south Africa. We are also now experiencing such a rapid surge in case numbers that it is actually uh quite frightening. I am moderately confident that the country will be able to cope on the other hand the rapidly increasing numbers are you know are a nasty surprise and I wonder what the future holds for us just a quarter of the population have been fully vaccinated, but it's not clear yet. How far the current vaccines protect against an infection with omicron we are seeing a lot of breakthrough infections in vaccines. which is of course a worry. we are also seeing re-infections in people who had previously been infected during one of the previous waves but the majority of infections so far are mild that's it we have to say that it's still early days and as we know to become clinically severe there will have to be 10 to 14 days or more after becoming infected so it's probably too early to tell South Africa's public health authorities to warn that more children and young adults are being hospitalized with the coronavirus many countries have placed new restrictions on travelers from South Africa

And even shut borders.

 The scientists who alerted the world to the omicron variant are facing a backlash at home but critics within the country that is now very hard hit by all these travel bans they are blaming. The scientists for actually doing sequencing and sharing results which I think is, not is quite misguided face masks are mandatory and there are limits on the number of people who can attend indoor and outdoor gatherings but, omicron continues its invisible race across South Africa and for more. scientists say the omicron variant is spreading more than twice as quickly as the delta variant we just heard there more kids are being hospitalized. How worried do we really need to be well? Scientists are still trying to get a clearer picture of what exactly Omnicom has in store it you know imagine a big puzzle and we're only just getting the first puzzle pieces but certainly those first puzzle pieces you know all add to the concern we now have some preliminary data that shows that this virus can, in fact, reinfect people certainly people who've had who've gone through an infection before and recovered and it does seem to be spreading very fast though that's always very hard to tell in the early days, we know certain super spreading events for instance that make it appear to be spreading faster. 

Actually will in the long run but certainly, if we've learned anything from the last two years is that in a situation like this you know we should rather act fast and be worried right now and then you know breathe a sigh of relief if we actually if it doesn't turn out to be as bad right.

The world health organization is saying that it has no evidence of any deaths linked to omicron yet. Countries are racing to impose stricter pandemic measures travel bans are in place would you say all of these restrictions are an overreaction so i i don't think it's an overreaction  I do think that travel bans you know you have to be very careful about what you do with travel bans all they do is buy you a little bit of time and they only make sense for a very short time because once the virus spreads you know wide in your own communities any way it doesn't really sense to impose them, and they have a fairly big cost attached to them so but the fact that we haven't seen any deaths so far in the in South Africa from omicron doesn't really tell us that much yet because it's still really early days. we know that it takes you to know two weeks for people once they go to the hospital and then for deaths actually to be reported. so Icoronavirus think at the moment i wouldn't read too much into it I mean we're all kind of hoping that maybe you know it does turn out to be a milder variant that spreads fast but is milder, but we really can't say that at the moment and we certainly shouldn't pin our hopes on that and not act and prepare okay so obviously there's a lot more to learn about this variant but of course omicron is the latest in a string of corona virus mutations. Since the start of the pandemic do we need to prepare ourselves for a potentially never-ending series of new mutations or you know is there anything that governments around the world could be doing better to try and bring this to an end well. what's very clear is that as long as this virus can spread in this you know a huge amount of people that it is spreading in at the moment mutations will keep arising and some of those mutations will give this virus advantages whether in transmissibility or in re-infecting people it might get around vaccine immunity and that's just something that we have to live with unless. We really try to do the hard work of suppressing the numbers i mean, we do have some experience with a virus that

keeps changing that's the flu and of course it might very well be that this turns into a virus that stays with us that's certainly, what it looks like that source cov2 will be with us for the long run but even then we are going to have to do the hard work of making sure that we're prepared for every season when it comes and just hope that it does indeed over time become a little bit milder.

 

let's take a look now at some more developments in pandemic Germany's BioNTech says, it should be able to adapt its covert 19 vaccines swiftly to deal with the omicron variant the Czech republic is preparing to mandate vaccinations for people over 60 as well as for medical workers and police and a man in Italy wore a fake silicon arm to try and trick a nurse into jabbing him so that he could get a covert 19 health certificate.