Omicron 'will be pretty much gone' from South Africa in weeks amid drop in cases: Experts

Experts have predicted that B.1.1.529 Omicron strain will be eliminated completely from South Africa, the country where the strain was first detected. Within a matter of just a few weeks the wave has largely subsided and the health officials are now predicting that the peak of B.1.1.529 is spiralling downwards. According to several reports, more than 70% of the total population previously infected with other COVID-19 variants has been able to more robustly fight the infection. South Africa’s top infectious disease scientist, Salim Abdool Karim, explained to the Washington Post on December 24, Friday that Africa has officially passed the peak of Omicron. 

“If previous variants caused waves shaped like Kilimanjaro, omicron’s is more like we were scaling the North Face of Everest,” said Karim in reference to South Africa’s sharp rise in COVID-19 cases during the first weeks of December.

“Now we’re going down, right back down, the south face,” Karim continued. “And that is the way we think it may work with a variant like Omicron, and perhaps even more broadly what we’ll see with subsequent variants at this stage of the pandemic.

Cases 29.8% lower than previous day

South African health minister stressed that the trend in new COVID-19 cases has been going downwards but last week Omicron accounted for nearly every new Coronavirus case in South Africa. The official told the paper that the recent data indicates there’s a slow decline which is being noticed as the cases go down. South Africa’s 'The National Institutes for Communicable Diseases' found this week that the seven-day average of positive COVID-19 cases across the country was 29.8% slightly low as compared to the day before, which was nearly 30.1%. The health officials believe that the rising trajectory and the lower severity of illness could be a factor that South Africa is finally seeing a decline. 

“In South Africa, variants, even highly mutated ones, will run out of people pretty quickly. Pretty much by the end of last week it was running out of steam; there just aren’t enough people left to infect,” said Karim. He then estimated that South Africa is “between two and three weeks ahead of the U.S., about two ahead of Norway and Denmark, and substantially ahead of, probably up to four weeks, the UK and the rest of Europe.”