Although the case tally is going up exponentially in several countries, World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan said the severity of the disease has not jumped to a new level.
certainly more transmissible but at least early data shows perhaps causes less severe illness for the vaccinated and boosted. is that how you read the data? well, look, i think the things that are important for us to try and understand are, one, that the doubling time for this variant is two to three days. what that means, just if you want to wrap your held around that, if you have 100,000 cases of omicron at christmas, by new year s, you have 400,000 cases. that s extraordinary and extraordinarily fast. the good news we know is that the booster works well against omicron and therefore people ought to get boosted if they haven t been. in terms of severity, it s really difficult to uncouple. i think what we think is that because of both prior boosts, prior vaccinations and prior infection, that the t-cell
problems and pressures put on the health service. health service. there is also that model and health service. there is also that model and previous health service. there is also that model and previous models - health service. there is also thatj model and previous models have health service. there is also that - model and previous models have been concerned to assess the severity data, but we don t have enough data yet with 0micron but i suspect in the uk population you will see still good protection from the vaccines, frequently t cell vaccines from pfizer and merck are on average will be boosted by those boosterjabs. from the data shown so far, from the small studies, there are six significant vaccine estate from the 0micron variant which is boosted by these booster so i would encourage people to get the boosters and hope that the t cell response will protect from severe illness and death and the increased case numbers we will see from 0micron. much we will see from omicron
haven t been boosted. the new variant is only a few weeks old. there s still a lot we do not know. there s still a bunch of questions that need answering. i m joined by two people who are going to help me unpack what we know and don t know. dr. celine bounder has served on the biden-harris covid advisory board. dr. eric toppeles, writer of the ground truth blog who s been following this closely. dr. toppele, let me start with you. we ve got i think three new preliminary data sets out in the last 24 hours from different labs, basically conducting experiments on how the omicron viral variant interacts with the antibody t-cell response, immune response in vaccinated individuals. right. give us a gloss of the finding there. okay. well, good to be with you, chris, and my friend, celine. so what we have are now five