The South African doctor who first raised the alarm on the Omicron variant said the symptoms she observed in patients are “unusual but mild.”
“It presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well,” Dr. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association told The Telegraph.
“So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer the loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home,” she said.
“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” Coetzee told The Telegraph.
She said she began observing patients with these symptoms around Nov.18, including a“very interesting case” of a 6-year-old girl.
She had “a temperature and a very high pulse rate, and I wondered if I should admit her. But when I followed up two days later, she was so much better.”
She fears that the unvaccinated and the elderly would be more vulnerable to the variant.
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease.”
Coetzee’s observations are based on a small number of cases she treated, and the variant may be a lot more dangerous than initially observed.
The World Health Organization said it will take weeks to understand how the variant may affect patients and vaccines.
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