E-Paper
December 7: What we know about Omicron so far
Omicron’s sequence was shared on November 22, South African authorities reported its spread on Novembe r 25, and it was designated a variant of concern on November 26.
Global stock markets, including India’s bourses, rallied on Tuesday, as did oil prices and the US dollar, as some signs trickled in of the Omicron variant possibly not being as worrisome as previously thought.
These signs suggest the variant may be causing a milder version of the disease, and they originate from data by the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in South Africa. A key endorsement of this early trend was made by White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci late on Monday, although he stressed that it was still early days.
Reading ground data
According to NICD data analysed by the Financial Times newspaper, there are two clear trends that can be read from Omicron hotspot Gauteng province: First, the share of Covid-positive hospital patients requiring intensive care and ventilators is markedly lower when compared to the beginning of the Delta variant wave; and second, the overall number of people testing positive for Covid-19 is now close to levels seen during the Delta wave at the same phase of the wave, but intensive care unit admissions have not risen in lockstep.
This mirrors a recent assessment by the NICD that found that this time, most of the hospitalised people are being treated on “room air” instead of needing oxygen support.
If these trends hold up for another week or two, Omicron may indeed be considered a milder variant. At present, the conclusion may be tenuous since there seems to be a larger share of younger people infected in Gauteng.
New scientific evidence
Two scientific studies reinforce what is being observed.
The first, one of the earliest neutralisation tests from which results seem to be available, was by GlaxoSmithKline’s biotech arm Vir Biotechnology, which found the company’s antibody treatment is still effective against the full combination of mutations in Omicron.
The study, data for which was not yet out as on Tuesday, found there was a less than threefold drop in neutralisation by the company’s product sotrovimab of an engineered virus with the same configuration as Omicron.
The second is new protein modelling by researchers from University of North Carolina, who used the AlphaFold2 deep learning model to create a simulation of the variant. Using what they found, and additional simulations of how known antibodies interact with the virus, the researchers predicted that there are “some structural changes in the receptor-binding domain that may reduce antibody interaction, but no drastic changes that would completely evade existing neutralizing antibodies (and therefore current vaccines)”.
The findings are significant since AlphaFold2, a machine learning protein modelling programme created by Google’s DeepMind, has previously shown unprecedented accuracy in determining how proteins fold, a visualisation that is a challenge to estimate from merely reading genomic data.
Omicron’s sequence was shared on November 22, South African authorities reported its spread on November 25, and it was designated a variant of concern on November 26. It is still early days for conclusive signs, but the early hopeful clues may not be entirely misleading.
