TORONTO – The threat posed by Omicron continues to increase day by day. In Ontario one of the most pressing difficulties is to understand to what extent the new variant is fueling the contagion in this wave of the pandemic. The problem, as Explained on Tuesday by Chief Medical Officer Kieran Moore and as the Provincial Technical Scientific Committee reiterated today, is represented by the fact that at this moment we are not able to have in hand a precise and exhaustive snapshot of the infections: the provincial laboratories have to deal with the analysis of backward swabs that go back a few days, therefore the presentation of daily data is – unlike the last twenty months – approximate and not able to provide a real mapping of infections.
In these days the number of positives has been abundantly above the average of recent months – today we once again broke through 4 thousand – yet we are very far from the predictions made by Moore himself and by numerous virologists about the replication capacity of Omicron, capable of doubling the number of infected every 2-3 days.
“Typically – said Peter Jüni, director of the Scientific Technical Committee – we start from the assumption of being able to identify about 40 percent of cases and we are seeing that the surveillance system begins to register difficulties”. With these percentages, with the numbers of these days the most accurate data should be over 10 thousand daily cases in Ontario.
But these are assumptions, conjectures that should be verified more precisely.
At this stage, also given the current inability of our laboratories to keep up in the analysis of swabs as has happened for the previous waves, there are those who propose to use other parameters to understand to what extent the contagion of Covid-19 is developing with the Omicron variant: some virologists ask that only certain data be evaluated, such as that of hospitalizations and hospitalizations in intensive care, while the data on cases is considered only marginally.
This is not a new approach, to tell the truth: in Great Britain in recent days, for example, the health authorities are presenting only the data of deaths and hospitalizations, while those of infections are published at a later time – today about 100 thousand cases – with the addition that these are very approximate values.
In any case, the Canadian scientific community is almost unanimous in considering this new wave – the Omicron wave, as it has already been renamed – as the heaviest and most threatening of this Covid-19 pandemic. And this despite the fact that indications have arrived in the world from many parts – a study by the University of Cambridge, such as data from South Africa – which indicate that Omicron leads to milder symptoms than the other variants: to counterbalance remains the fact that the new strain is much more contagious than the previous ones and is therefore destined to infect a greater number of people.
