Professor Lockdown today made gloomy predictions that there would be up to 5,000 Omicrons dying each day in winter. He called for tighter restrictions within two weeks.
Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London and his colleagues found “no evidence” that this variant was more severe than Delta, but they believe it to be five-and a half times as likely to re-infect and weaken vaccines.
Based on Omicron’s spread across the UK and South Africa as well as lab tests for vaccine efficacy, they determined that Omicron is a major threat to public safety.
Professor Ferguson — a Government adviser whose modelling has spooked No10 into lockdowns before — said tighter curbs were needed ‘in a week or two’ to have a significant effect on the size of the peak of the new wave.
These projections are raising concerns about Britons being stung last-minute by festive restrictions. Boris Johnson refused repeatedly to allow a total lockdown to be in place if hospitals start to rise.
Wales already confirmed the return to social distancing from Boxing Day. Scots should limit their mixing to 3 households, and English citizens are encouraged to prioritize social events.
In a best case scenario, Imperial said without further curbs there could be in the region of 3,000 daily Omicron deaths at the peak in January — significantly higher than the previous record of 1,800 during the second wave.
Professor Azra Khani (an epidemiologist at the university) said that the modeling was an “illustration” of the necessity to act.
Yesterday, Chris Whitty told MPs yesterday that he was ‘extremely cautious’ about SAGE’s modelling of Omicron because there are still some ‘really critical things we don’t know’ about the variant.
SAGE has been called out several times for its models of overegging UK’s epidemic. The most recent criticism was that it projected 6,600 daily Delta hospital admissions in Oct.
The scenarios were not for Britain. Professor Ferguson’s model team instead presented hypothetical scenarios to a country of high income with significant prior transmission and access to vaccines. Based on the severity of Omicron and how it can be evaded vaccines, three scenarios were presented by modelers for daily Covid deaths. According to their most realistic estimate, 100 people per day would die if the country had vaccinated all over-40s. The other end of this scale was 50/million when similar vaccination calculations were considered. MailOnline said that its central projection, which the team told MailOnline was their ‘best estimation’, indicated daily deaths of around 75 per thousand people by early 2022.
Professor Ferguson — the Government adviser whose modelling has spooked No10 into lockdowns before — said tighter curbs were needed ‘in a week or two’ to have a significant effect on the size of the peak of the new wave
Professor Ferguson’s group did not create scenarios for Britain. Instead, they created hypothetical situations for countries with high levels of prior vaccination and substantial income.
Based on the severity of Omicron and its resistance to vaccines, three scenarios were presented by modelers for daily Covid deaths.
The most optimistic estimate by the team was 100 deaths per day for a country which had vaccinated over 10 percent of its population and gave boosters to over 40s, much like the UK.
The other end of this scale was 50/million when identical vaccination calculations were considered.
MailOnline said that its central projection, which the team told MailOnline was their ‘best estimation’, indicated daily deaths of around 75 people per day by early 2022.
In theory, this means Britain could experience 5,000 daily deaths. This is four times as many deaths than during the second wave.
Study results showed that Omicron symptoms are more likely to develop in those with Delta vaccines, or boosters.
Vaccine effectiveness was estimated to be around 20 per cent after two doses and between 55 per cent and 80 per cent after a booster dose.
To arrive at the estimated figures, the scientists relied on data from both the UK Health Security Agency and the NHS. This included all confirmed PCR-confirmed Covid patients in England.
Omicron’s risk of reinfection was 5.4 times higher than the Delta variant. Imperial claimed that Omicron meant immunity. Past infection can be as low at 19%
Professor Ferguson said:The study further supports the fact that Omicron is capable of evading prior immunity from both vaccination and infection.
Omicron is a serious threat to the public’s health because of its immune evasion.
The Omicron infection was not more severe than Delta. Data on hospital admissions, however, were low. In fact, only 16 British patients had been admitted to the hospital with Omicron.
This is in spite of a large real-world study that involved 78,000 South Africans. It found Omicron to be up to 30% milder than the older versions and results in a third less hospitalizations.
England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty has previously called for ‘serious caution’ over interpreting the promising data on Omicron coming from South Africa.
He said the same patterns may not be replicated in the UK in part due to South Africa’s last wave being more recent so population-wide immunity was fresher.