The first data on Omicron symptoms in the US is starting to trickle in, and it's an early sign that vaccines are doing their job of warding off severe illness, even though mild, cold-like infections may quickly become easier to catch for vaccine people.
The first 43 Omicron cases were confirmed across 22 US states. The cases were mild. A person was hospitalized and discharged after a few days.
The CDC said cough, fatigue, and congestion were the most common symptoms.
The sick included many vaccinations and boosted adults. The patient was hospitalized.
Of the 43 included in the report.
40 were not normal.
34 of them were fully vaccine free.
25 were under the age of 40.
Fourteen people traveled internationally in the past two weeks.
Fourteen were boosted.
6 had trouble breathing.
6 had been coronaviruses infections.
3 people lost their sense of smell or taste.
The person was hospitalized for 2 days.
The majority of Omicron cases had a cough, and more than half had fatigue or congestion. It was less common to report nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Three cases had a loss of taste or smell, which is a symptom of earlier coronaviruses.
In both the EU and the UK, that cold-like symptom profile is what other reports have uncovered.
A researcher in the UK said that most people would have thought they had a cold.
A passenger from a flight from South Africa is tested for COVID-19 at Amsterdam Schiphol airport on December 2, 2021.
Pierre Crom is a photographer.
Europe has identified over 300 Omicron cases so far. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in its latest update on Wednesday that no Omicron deaths have been reported yet.
In the UK, a symptom tracker that uses a phone app to record how many people are feeling every day has recorded a trend of more mild infections among vaccine recipients.
The principal investigator of the ZOE COVID study said he is seeing signs that Omicron is spreading, even though Delta still accounts for more than 85% of cases in the UK.
At a 60-year-old's birthday party, Spector described a recent "superspreader" event. There were 18 people who werevaccinated and many who were boosted. Even though a good chunk of the partygoers took rapid COVID tests before the party, one of them later tested positive, and within a couple of days, 15 others who'd attended the party did too.
It's highly unlikely that Delta would do that. Even if you're double or triple vaxed, it's still not preventing infections.
The UK Health Security Agency says that Omicron is showing a growth advantage over Delta, and that the new variant is likely to out compete Delta in the UK.
It's going to be harder to trace and test this variant because of that.
He said that they have to be sensible. Most people will have thought they had a bad cold.
No one in the UK has been hospitalized or died as a result of an Omicron infections.
We're detecting Omicron in people who've received vaccinations.
A nurse checks the fit of protective equipment before entering a patient's room.
The images are Win McNamee.
Scientists don't know if Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta.
The director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh thinks that is nonsense.
Cooper and many other scientists think that the reason for the milder symptoms is that more people have immunity to the virus, either through vaccinations or natural infections.
"I think it's because it's infecting people that have already seen a coronaviruses before," Cooper said.
Young people who are less likely to be hospitalized and more likely to have mild symptoms are the majority of Omicron cases detected so far.
The variant of Omicron makes up less than 1% of the cases in Europe and the US, so disease experts caution against making too many predictions about its severity.
Bob Wachter, the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Insider that they have only seen a few Omicron patients in the Bay Area. We can't make much sense of what we've seen so far because the numbers are so small.
The CDC said that Omicron could overwhelm health systems.
The more Omicron spreads, the more likely it is that people will get Omicron and get hospitalized and die. Omicron is thought to be more transmissible than other coronaviruses, and early lab studies suggest it's better at evading the vaccine than the original version.
The CDC said in the report that a highly transmissible variant could result in enough cases to overwhelm health systems.
The CDC stresses that booster doses are an urgent need for everyone who is at higher risk of severe COVID-19, including nursing homes and long-term care facility residents.
The CDC still recommends that people bevaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask, and test for Omicron, for now.
