The latest analysis by the UKHSA reveals that people with omicron are significantly less likely to develop severe symptoms but at the same time, vaccine boosters also see its effectiveness quickly wear off.
On the former, early results suggest that people are 50 to 70% less likely to be hospitalised if they are infected with omicron as opposed to the delta variant. That just confirms what we mostly presume at this point.
However, mRNA vaccine boosters are seen losing effectiveness after a month (weeks 5-9) against omicron and more notably the effectiveness can be as low as 30 to 50% from week 10 onwards.
The UKHSA notes that such impact on vaccine efficacy was not observed with the delta variant.
I guess there's some good and bad takeaways from the study above but on the balance of things, it mainly rebuffs the ongoing narrative for the most part.
Even if less severe, it isn't ideal to have omicron spread like wildfire. The sheer volume of cases in such an event will still cause trouble in terms of medical capacity. So, that is still a risk to be wary of next year.
