Case, Vaccine Data Show Modest Gain vs Omicron Variant

Two vaccine makers said their shots protected against Omicron as UK data suggested it may cause proportionally fewer hospital cases than the Delta coronavirus variant, though public health experts warned the battle against COVID-19 was far from over, James Macharia and Josephine Mason reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: AstraZeneca and Novavax joined other vaccine manufacturers in saying their shots protect against the Omicron variant.

Similarly encouraging signs about hospitalization rates emerged from South Africa on Wednesday, but the head of a leading African health agency joined the World Health Organization (WHO) in cautioning that it was too soon to draw broad conclusions about Omicron's virulence.

"Let's be careful not to extrapolate what we are seeing in South Africa across the continent, or across the world," Africa Centers for Disease Control (CDC) chief John Nkengasong told a media briefing.

Coronavirus infections have soared wherever highly infectious Omicron has spread, triggering new restrictions in many countries. First identified last month in southern Africa and Hong Kong, the variant is becoming dominant in much of Europe including Britain, where daily new infections have soared beyond 100,000.

In France, daily coronavirus cases - currently close to 90,000 - could rise into the hundreds of thousands in January, a scientific adviser to President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday, while Germany reported its first Omicron death.

In Italy, the first Western country to be hit by the pandemic last year, the National Health Institute said Omicron would soon predominate, while Greece banned public Christmas festivities to curb its spread. Both countries also made outdoor mask-wearing mandatory.

But increases in hospitalizations and deaths in South Africa and Britain since Omicron took hold appear to have been only gradual, and AstraZeneca and Novavax joined other vaccine manufacturers in saying their shots protect against it.

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