South Africa’s leading experts in the fight against the pandemic were cautiously optimistic on Monday regarding the ability of existing vaccines to prevent serious Covid-19 due to the new omicron variant, although they expect a rapid increase in infections in the coming days.
“Based on what we know, and how other worrying strains have responded to vaccine immunity, we can expect that we will still see high efficacy against hospitalization and serious illness,” said Professor Salim Abdool Karim, one of Africa’s top scientists. South, during a press conference.
“Vaccine protection will likely remain strong. We don’t know that definitively, studies are under way, but based on what we know, we can expect this to be the likely scenario, that vaccines will hold up well in terms of preventing hospitalizations because they are more dependent of T-cell immunity and less of antibodies,” he added.
According to this expert, South Africa could offer more data in two to three weeks, but current predictions are based mainly on experience with mutations that were already present in other previous variants – such as alpha, beta, gamma and delta – which although they had “some degree of evasion of the previous immune response”, severe cases still continue to be fought with vaccines.
In addition, experts point out that the growth of cases in South Africa may be due to omicron, but that, above all, hospitalizations affected mostly unvaccinated people.
The omicron variant appears more likely to evade antibody immunity naturally generated by previous infections, and therefore an increase in reinfections in unvaccinated people who have already had Covid-19 is expected.
Despite everything, Karim also underlined that the new variant has a high number of mutations and that, although some are known, others are totally new and there is still no “idea” of its impact.
The apparent increase in transmission of this new variant seems relatively certain and therefore South African experts are already predicting that in the coming days South Africa will see a rapid increase in the number of cases.
In fact, Karim hopes that the approximately 2,500/3 thousand new cases per day that the country has registered in recent days will approach 10,000 by the end of this week.
In terms of severity and clinical effects, although no “red flags” have yet been raised, experts say the data is still “anecdotal” and also biased by factors such as the fact that most new cases are detected in South Africa have been among young people.
The discovery of this new variant of the coronavirus, identified as B.1.1.529 and named with the Greek letter omicron by the World Health Organization (WHO), was announced last Thursday by scientists and health authorities in South Africa. Coronavirus version is characterized by a large number of mutations.
More than a dozen countries around the world have already confirmed cases of this variant.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/south-african-experts-trust-vaccine-response-to-omicron/
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