Covid omicron latest news: Pfizer sees ‘40-fold reduction in antibodies’ against omicron but still provides some protection -study

South Korea is considering expanding home treatment of Covid-19 patients, a health official said on Wednesday, amid fears of rising pressure on hospitals as cases spike once again in the country to record numbers.

The country reported 7,175 new coronavirus cases and 63 deaths on Tuesday, the first time daily infections were over 7,000, while hospitals treated a record 840 critical and serious cases.

“It is important to retain or reduce the trend of the current scale of the severely-ill patients within a week or two,” Son Young-rae, a senior health ministry official, told a news conference.

He also said the government may need to make some adjustments to the way the healthcare system in the country works if cases continue to rise, including expanding the limit of Covid patients who can receive at-home treatment.

Already, asymptomatic patients and those with mild symptoms and below the age of 70 can treat themselves at home in the country.

The government will mobilise additional personnel to oversee coronavirus patients treating themselves at home and improve the emergency transfer system to hospitals for those who develop severe symptoms.

Australia’s Queensland has detected two new cases of omicron, including one with a different lineage of the new variant.

While Australia already has confirmed instances of community transmission of omicron, the two cases are the first for Queensland.

Two men, who travelled from Nigeria and South Africa, were found infected with the omicron variant and both have been isolated while their contacts are being tested, officials confirmed on Wednesday.

But samples of one of the people tested, who travelled from South Africa to Brisbane on Saturday, was found to have a slightly different lineage of omicron genetically.

The scientific team that spotted the difference has passed it on to the international committee, resulting in reclassification of the variant into two lineages.

“The important part is those two sub-lineages, one has the S gene dropout and is the normal means of screening for omicron … but then this other gene then doesn’t have this S gene dropout,” Queensland’s chief health officer Peter Aitken was quoted as saying by ABC Australia.

He added that new classification would make it easier for people to recognise the potential spread of omicron in all communities.

The United States’ top infectious disease official has said that the omicron coronavirus variant is “clearly highly transmissible”, but is “almost certainly” not more severe than delta.

Speaking to Agence France-Presse, Dr Anthony Fauci said that experiments testing the potency of antibodies from the various vaccines against the omicron variant should be available in the “next few days to a week”.

Reacting to the early lab tests in South Africa showing Pfizer’s reduced efficacy in protecting against the omicron variant, a World Health Organisation (WHO) official said existing vaccines should be able to provide adequate protection against severe cases even with the new variant.

According to the WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan, there was no sign yet that omicron would be better at evading vaccines than other variants.

“We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalisation, and there’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be so” for omicron, Dr Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, told AFP news agency.

He added that initial data suggested omicron did not cause more severe illness but became milder.

“If anything, the direction is towards less severity,” he said.

Researchers in South Africa have found in an early study that Pfizer’s vaccine provides some protection against the new omicron variant, but less than it provided with other variants.

Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban conducted the first experiment gauging the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine on omicron and found that it resulted in about a 40-fold reduction in levels of neutralising antibodies produced by people who had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE shot, compared with the variant detected in China almost two years ago.

Alex Sigal, the head of research at the laboratory, said that the loss of immune protection is “robust, but not complete” and that further efficacy studies are needed to ascertain the extent of protection Pfizer can provide, adding that a booster dose can increase the protection.

“A good booster probably would decrease your chance of infection, especially severe infection leading to more severe disease,” the Bloomberg news agency quoted the researcher as saying. “People who haven’t had a booster should get one, and people who have been previously infected should be vaccinated.”

Welcome to The Independent’s live blog covering the Covid-19 pandemic for Wednesday 8 December.