Norwegian officials today published an insightful look at an omicron superspreader Christmas party at a restaurant on Nov 26.
That's barely two weeks ago so the data is incredibly early but I think it's insightful.
- Around 70% of the 100 participants at the party were diagnosed with covid
- 60 other people who visited the same restaurant that evening were infected
- 17 cases confirmed omicron, testing ongoing but all believed to be omicron
- Most participants aged 30-50
- All except one of those who were diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 reported symptoms. Most reported symptom onset three days after the party
- Over 70% of cases reported cough, lethargy, headache, sore throat and over half of them reported fever. No hospital admissions have been reported
- Vast majority of the participants had two doses of mRNA vaccine
That's both scary and good news. What's scary is that such a high percentage of the attendees were infected. That's much worse than anything we've seen with covid before and fits in with other talk that it's 4x more infectious. There's a chance there were more than one person with covid there spreading it but overall it's frightening and could have short-term economic consequences. How many people would go to an event if there was a good chance that 35% of attendees end up with a fever in a few days? That's not exactly life-threatening but it's no fun.
As for interpreting the findings, here's what the Norwegian authorities say:
"Even though most of the cases have not had a severe disease course at this time, almost all developed symptoms relatively quickly after the Christmas party. The attendees were young and fully vaccinated and would not typically develop serious illness after SARS-CoV-2 infection. It is therefore difficult to comment on the severity of the disease with this variant based on these preliminary results."
To me it's looking like this will just have to rip through the population. Hopefully the symptoms aren't much worse in the elderly and sick but you can certainly imagine the scale of the problem for hospitals if they are.
