UK SAGE: 1,000 Omicron hospitalizations a day by new year

BBC Health Reporter: “The number of people needing hospital treatment from the Omicron variant may reach at least 1,000 a day in England by the end of the year without extra restrictions being put in place – Sage scientists have told ministers.”  More...

Preprint: Omicron incompletely escapes immunity induced by the Pfizer vaccine

Laboratory research from South Africa strongly suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant escapes antibody immunity induced by the Pfizer-BioNTech (Comirnaty) vaccine, but that considerable immunity is retained in people who were both vaccinated and previously infected.  More...

Norway: “situation is more worrying now than in previous pandemic waves”

“The threat from Omicron is enormous”. NIPH director Camilla Stoltenberg says the Omicron variant of the coronavirus can cause a lot of infection and disease, “perhaps more than before in the pandemic”.  More...

FFP2 masks more effective at preventing Covid infection than vaccines

Max Planck: “When both wear a surgical mask, while the infectious is speaking, the very conservative upper bound remains below 30% after 1h, but, when both wear a well-fitting FFP2 mask, it is 0.4%”

We find, for a typical SARS-CoV-2 viral load and infectious dose, that social distancing alone, even at 3m between two speaking individuals, leads to an upper bound of 90% for risk of infection after a few minutes.  More...