Studies Suggest Why Omicron Is Less Severe: It Spares the Lungs

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html

Studies Suggest Why Omicron Is Less Severe: It Spares the Lungs
Compared with earlier variants, Omicron may cause less damage to the lungs, new animal research suggests.
By Carl Zimmer and Azeen Ghorayshi
Dec. 31, 2021 Updated 11:58 a.m. ET

A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus.

In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty.

“It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.

In November, when the first report on the Omicron variant came out of South Africa, scientists could only guess at how it might behave differently from earlier forms of the virus. All they knew was that it had a distinctive and alarming combination of more than 50 genetic mutations.

[mucifer]

1. The hospitals are slammed with covid now. I wonder if lots of it is delta

[LisaL]

2. More people will end up in the hospital even if

omicron is less severe than Delta, because there are so many cases.

[mucifer]

3. We also probably are much more aware of cases now than months ago with so much testing.

The testing is great for slowing the spread to those at high risk.

[LisaL]

7. It's very hard to get tested right now.

NT

[AZSkiffyGeek]

4. Reports from England were that they were asymptomatic cases

That were found when someone went in for another issue and tested positive.

[LisaL]

8. I don't know what England is reporting, but hospitals in US are swamped with covid cases.

Those would be people who ended up in a hospital for covid related issues.
Some are on ventilators.

[Tomconroy]

5. In the northeast it's a combination of delta and omicron.

In the south it is pretty much pure Omicron. That's what Dr. Howard Forman of Yale says.

[LisaL]

9. You don't need to be a Doctor from Yale to figure that out, since the South was almost done with

their Delta wave before their Omicron wave started. So the cases in the South are Omicron.

[Tomconroy]

10. When making an assertion of fact it's a good idea to reference an expert.

[Wounded Bear]

6. I think that is also why it is more vax resistant...

the upper respiratory track doesn't have the same access to antibodies as the lungs do.

Oh well, still masking and avoiding.

[Deminpenn]

11. There is some research indicating that this mutation

may have actually picked up some genetic code from the virus that causes the common cold. Doesn't make it the same as a common cold, though.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/05/omicron-variant-may-have-picked-up-a-piece-of-common-cold-virus.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/05/omicron-variant-may-have-picked-up-a-piece-of-common-cold-virus.html