A prominent South African scientist, Salim Abdool Karim, on Wednesday said future coronavirus variants could be much weaker than the current fast-spreading Omicron mutant – which is less severe than the previous Delta variant.
Karim said studies South Africa has conducted have shown a promising trend in terms of new Covid-19 variants which could continue to evolve to spread faster but cause less severe diseases.
“What we are likely to see now – with future variants – is that in order to displace Omicron, it’s going to have to be able to spread even faster,” Karim said.
He added: “But just based on what we can see now, we can expect that future variants, in order to beat Omicron, would have to – in all likelihood – be less severe.”
Preliminary findings from two South African clinical trials suggested the Omicron variant had a much higher rate of “asymptomatic carriage” than earlier variants, which could explain why it had spread so rapidly across the globe, the epidemiologist said.
The studies – one of which was carried out when Omicron infections were surging in South Africa last month and another which re-sampled participants around the same time – found a far greater number of people tested positive for the coronavirus but were not showing symptoms compared to previous trials, Karim said.
He added that the “higher asymptomatic carriage rate is likely a major factor in the rapid and widespread dissemination of the variant, even among populations with high prior rates of coronavirus infection.”
South Africa experienced a fourth wave surge in Covid-19 infections from late November, around the time its scientists alerted the world to the Omicron variant.
But the new cases have since fallen and early indications were that the fourth wave has been marked by less severe diseases compared to the third wave of the Delta variant.
NM/jn/APA