As Omicron Spreads, It Could Take Weeks Before We Know More About the COVID Variant

our way to the virus being endemic. Andrew Joseph, reporter at stat News, joins us for the bottom line, it will take weeks and more data before we know. Thanks for joining us, Andrew, Yeah, thanks so much. Let's talk about the variant that everybody is talking about right now, omikron of COVID nineteen. Now, there's a lot of stuff that we don't know about this. President Biden was speaking the other day and said this is a variant of concern.

We shouldn't be panicking over this just yet. And that's true. There's so much we don't know about it. Cheap among things is we don't know if this variant causes much more severe illness and people and that's what everybody's looking at. It could be more transmissible, it could evade the vaccines a little bit. All that stuff will bear out, and it's going to take a couple of weeks, actually a few weeks to really get more data on all this.

So this is really what we're talking about here, And from what we're hearing from some doctors so far that have been encountering this is that it might cause milder cases of COVID. So, Andrew, what do we know about this so far? Yeah, so some some South African physicians who are actually seeing this have said that the patients they've seen are generally mild cases. And that's true that

as of now. But I think a lot of experts would say, like, you know, we need to see a lot more patients to get any sense of what if whether the severity of symptoms broadly changes, and so, yeah, and we need a little bit more time to see, you know, the trends and hospitalizations and death because COVID for a lot of people is a mild illness and so it could just be that these are the patients

they're seeing. The patients that the South African physicians have reported seen have been generally younger who are as we all know, are more likely to have milder illness. So there's a couple other factors that play here, and we just need to see i think, more patient data in a little bit more time to know. Tell me about the difficulties with all that, because let's say you get COVID, you get a test, it's confirmed, you know, for people

that have mild cases are probably gonna stay home. Who knows if that goes on to get sequenced by a lab somewhere. Maybe some people just get sick and stay home and never see a doctor or get tested, you know. So it's so tough to pit the two, you know, the variance against each other and see which one is much more severe, right because so you know, a virus, like everyone knows, is evolving and it can influence its transmissibility, can influence how it reacts to like our immune responses.

But in theory, it can also become more or less virulent, basically cause less or worse disease on average. That's a really hard one to pick up and less you know, if it's like dramatic change, like no one's going to the hospital or everyone's going to hospital. You'll pick that up more quickly, but if it's a subtle change, it's

really hard to pick up. And because there are so many other things that influence patient outcomes, like you know, if you're looking at a certain area, like what is the rough age demographics of the people, do a lot of people have underlying health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID? You know, what's the health care capacity like?

And you know, and now there's the other thing that we're seeing is that in a lot of places there's a lot of population immunity out there, whether from vaccination or prior infections, and so that might mean that if you have that level of protection from past exposure to the virus or from being vaccinated, maybe you can't block the infection entirely, but you're going to have mild illness.

So this could be also be a relic of that because South afris had pretty substantial waves of COVID already, and that's the exact point, right that what we're seeing in South Africa with them is they have had those waves. This amicron variant is happening in younger people, so we have yet to see how it really affects older people or people that have those comorbidities. You know, there's a lot still at play. That's why it's you know, everybody's talking about it, but it is you know, there's no

need to panic just yet. We don't know enough about it. And even with the Delta variant when we talked about that, obviously that was responsible for some of the big waves that we just had recently, even that when the jury is still out on whether it caused more severe illness,

Delta's biggest threat was how transmissible it was. And and actually transmissibility is kind of the thing that scientists worry about most because a more transmissible variant will cause more cases, and that's more illness and death than like even a variant that causes just like a more severe disease like on an individual basis. That's just the numbers game at

that point. Yeah, exactly. But to your point, Yeah, so there were some studies and again this just kind of goes how hard it is to study this if it is a small difference, Like there were some studies that showed countries had a higher hospitalization rates during Delta waves and and you know a lot of doctors said the patients they were seeing seemed to be getting sicker and faster with delta, but other studies came to like to find that there were no differences between delta and earlier waves.

So it's kind of yeah, it just kind of goes to show that. Like, it's pretty hard to know for sure, because these are difficult things to study in the environments in which these variants are spreading in and the fact that the variants are often spreading not at the same time. As I mentioned, there's still a lot yet to know about this. But let's say some of these things hold true. Let's say people are getting much milder illness from this

new omicron variant. Could that be a good thing. Could we be on our way to this virus being endemic something we live with, something more of a common cold rather than the pandemic that we're currently in in in you know, high debts and and all that stuff. Could this be something that is a positive almost I guess we're moving past it now. If these cases really are mild, or if a greater percentage of them is mild, let's say, because it's probably not going to be, that would be

a great thing. Whether that means that the virus has changed to become just like cosm older illness or because it would show that prior exposure to virus or vaccination is turning this from like what can be a really serious infection into generally more of a mild infection. And that's how we kind of move, as you said, towards intimocity as opposed to like this acute emergency that we've been in now for almost two years. Well, we need

more patient data. As you mentioned, it's going to take a few weeks before we really start to see the trajectory of what this variant is. It's popping up in a lot of countries, I believe. The last time I heard and this could change at any moment, right we still hadn't had any cases in the United States, but people are pretty much believing that it's going to be here at any moment, or could already be here. So just keep your ear out for updates on this. It's

nothing to worry about just yet. We still need more data on all of that. Andrew Joseph, reporter at stat News, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much, appreciate it. I'm Oscar Ramiress and this has been reopening America, don't forget that today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, So follow us and I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast