A South African study offered pre-Christmas good tidings about the severity of Omicron on Wednesday as the fast-spreading coronavirus variant forces countries across the world to impose new curbs.
German health experts said on Wednesday that new curbs probably did not go far enough as the health minister said he had not ruled out a full lockdown.
However, the South African study suggested that those infected with Omicron were less likely to end up in hospital than those with Delta.The study by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and major universities, which had not been peer-reviewed, compared South African Omicron data from October and November with data about Delta between April and November.
"In South Africa, this is the epidemiology: Omicron is behaving in a way that is less severe," said Professor Cheryl Cohen of the NICD, one of the authors.
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