Petr Sarukhanov/»New»
—At the beginning of the pandemic, there was this theory: the virus would mutate, becoming less and less “evil” at the same time, until the infection turned into a common cold. Does Omicron confirm or refute this?
Olga Matveeva
molecular biologist (Massachusetts, USA)
Omicron is a tangle of different «news»: bad, not very bad, and in some ways even good. The main thing is that many of the questions that arose with its appearance, as information from different countries arrives, answers appear, in which the bad is intertwined with the good. I thought I'd tell you the bad first, then the good. But all this is woven into such a tangle that, apparently, it will not be possible to separate it, all the time it is necessary to consider the virus from both sides.
— From the bad, we see a sharp increase in the incidence. The feeling is that even those who held out for two years, who were not taken by previous strains, fell ill.
— And this we see only the surface part of the iceberg. At the same time, the incidence rate, which is visible «on the surface», is very dependent on the level of testing in different countries. That is, the first criterion is the incidence, visible as a result of testing. The second criterion by which the danger of a strain can be assessed is the number of hospitalizations, within these data is the number of patients who switched to oxygen support and those who ended up in intensive care. But we do not have complete data for all countries, so we get such a “patchwork quilt”: there is information here, but not here. Some countries and some US states are using another way to track outbreaks: wastewater. It helps very well to see when the epidemic starts, when it reaches its peak, when it comes to naught.