SARS-COV-2 new strain can get around both natural and post-vaccine immunity, but disease is more easily tolerated.

The Omicron coronavirus strain is 4.2 times more infectious than Delta, and can bypass innate immunity or developed after vaccines.

Hiroshi Nishiura, a Kyoto University professor of health and environmental sciences who specializes in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, studied genome data from South Africans in Gauteng province until November 26.

“The omicron variant transmits more, and escapes immunity built naturally and through vaccines more,” said Nishiura.

To be honest, Nishiura’s study hasn’t been peer-reviewed and put in a scientific journal. The same method was used in a July study by the Eurosurveillance medical journal that looked at delta’s chances of winning the Tokyo Olympics.

Hundreds of researchers from around the world are racing to understand the new strain, which is the most distinct of the five types of concern reported by the WHO since the pandemic began.

Since the discovery of omicron two weeks ago, the number of cases in South Africa has risen dramatically to approximately 20,000 each day. According to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker, the number of Covid cases in the country had remained low in recent weeks, despite only 26 percent of the population being fully vaccinated.

“The vaccination rate was less than 30% and many people were probably naturally infected. We need to pay close attention to future trends to see if the same thing will happen in countries where mRNA vaccines are used at a high rate,” the scientist said.

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