Finally, a bit of good news about COVID-19:
The Covid-19 virus is spreading faster than ever in South Africa, the country's president said Monday, an indication of how the new Omicron variant is driving the pandemic, but there are early indications that Omicron may cause less serious illness than other forms of the virus.
Researchers at a major hospital complex in Pretoria reported that their patients with the coronavirus are much less sick than those they have treated before, and that other hospitals are seeing the same trends. In fact, they said, most of their infected patients were admitted for other reasons and have no Covid symptoms.
Even the normally pessimistic doomsayer Fauci is seeing the same thing:
"It's too early to be able to determine the precise severity of the disease, but inklings that we are getting — and we must remember these are still in the form of anecdotal, but hopefully in the next few weeks we'll get a much clearer picture — but it appears that with the cases that are seen we are not seeing a very severe profile of disease," he said.
Live look at the whole world after reading this:
Okay, to be fair, as the New York Times notes, scientists are pointing out that "more study is needed before experts can say much about [omicron] with confidence."
