A couple of weeks ago a diary was published claiming that Omicron was likely good news because it’s milder and also more transmissible. The idea was we were finally turning the corner, SARS-CoV-2 was becoming far less lethal and more like a lot of endemic but usually manageable infectious diseases, like the flu or the common cold.
The author quoted a well-known YouTube influencer, Dr John Campbell (doctorate in Nursing), who is a retired nurse educator and author of nursing textbooks.
The problem was, as I said in my comment in that diary, there was little basis for what Campbell was saying. At that point in time, the data on Omicron was mainly from South Africa — a far younger population than the UK (Campbell’s home country) or the U.S., and a population that had a high rate of previous infection that likely gave some protection in terms of symptoms against the new variant.
I just watched some of Campbell’s recent video and he is once again claiming that Omicron is good news, that it’s milder than previous variants. He even implied that the wide spread is a good thing because, you know, herd immunity (though I don’t think he used that term).
What’s the evidence for that? Well, much lower rates of hospitalization relative to the number of cases!
There’s a huge fallacy in that — Omicron is massively transmissible and unlike Delta, is infecting both unvaccinated and vaccinated. The vaccinated/boosted who are infected are mostly faring pretty well, while the unvaccinated are not. So the severity of the Delta variant, which is based on infections in mainly unvaccinated people, is being compared to the severity of Omicron which is based on infections in a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated (though likely more unvaccinated). These are not equivalent populations and the comparison is not valid.
It’s entirely possible that Omicron is less severe than previous variants. But we simply do not have enough information to draw that conclusion yet. (I saw mention of a couple of studies saying Omicron was milder, but in each of them, the population was a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated).
There are 2 other considerations:
1. Reinfection. Apparently the likelihood of reinfection with Omicron is higher than with Delta:
The report also estimated that after taking individual risk factors into account, the odds of reinfection with Omicron are 5.4 times greater than for reinfection with Delta. A study of healthcare workers in the pre-Omicron era estimated that a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection afforded 85% protection against a second infection over 6 months, the researchers said, while "the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%."
2. We don’t know about Long Covid and Omicron. In fact we know way too little about Long Covid in general and certainly virtually nothing about it in relation to the Omicron variant. And Long Covid is a major threat to the well-being of COVID survivors and to the world in terms of large numbers of people who have continuing need for more intense healthcare. If the incidence of Omicron variant Long Covid is similar to that with previous variants, with the huge transmissibility of Omicron, many millions more people will be burdened with this chronic health condition.
And BTW, to those who were defending Campbell and saying he was an absolutely reliable source, this was in Wikipedia — you might want to look into it:
In November 2021, Campbell said in a video that ivermectin might have been responsible for a sudden decline in COVID-19 cases in Japan. However, the drug had never been officially authorised for such use in the country—its use was merely promoted by the chair of a non-governmental medical association in Tokyo, and it has no established benefit as a COVID-19 treatment.[3] Meaghan Kall, the Lead Epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency, said that Campbell was confusing causation and correlation, and that even so there was no evidence of ivermectin use in Japan; rather, the story was based on "anecdata on social media driving wildly damaging misinformation".[3]
In November 2021, Campbell quoted from a non-peer-reviewed journal abstract by Steven Gundry saying that mRNA vaccines might cause heart problems. Campbell said he was not sure about the claim or its quality, but did not mention the expression of concern that had been published for the abstract, saying instead that it could be "incredibly significant". The video was viewed over 2 million times within a few weeks and was used by anti-vaccination activists as support for the misinformation that COVID-19 vaccination will cause a wave of heart attacks.[4]
