Omicron not less severe than earlier Covid-19 variants, large US study finds
- Previous studies, which suggested the strain was more infectious, but milder, had not taken sufficient account of the effects of vaccines, the researchers say
- Risks of death and hospitalisation were nearly identical between the Omicron era and when different variants were dominant, according to the report
The Omicron variant of the Sars-CoV2 virus is intrinsically as severe as previous variants, according to a preprint version of a large US study that counters assumptions in other studies that it was more transmissible but less severe.
The findings, which estimated Omicron’s severity after accounting for the impact of vaccines, should reinforce the importance of inoculations and booster shots, experts said. Vaccines helped keep hospitalisations and deaths relatively low during the Omicron surge compared with previous variants.
The study, which is undergoing peer review at Nature Portfolio, was posted on Research Square on May 2. The authors, from Massachusetts General Hospital, Minerva University and Harvard Medical School, declined to comment until peer review is completed.
“We found that the risks of hospitalisation and mortality were nearly identical” between the Omicron era and times in the past two years when different variants were dominant, the researchers said in their report.
The new study, based on records of 130,000 Covid-19 patients in Massachusetts, is unique and “pretty strong”, said Dr Arjun Venkatesh of Yale School of Medicine and the Yale Centre for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, who was not involved in the research.
Rather than just looking at numbers of deaths and hospitalisations, as earlier studies have done, it accounted for patients’ vaccination status and medical risk factors and compared similar groups of people, Venkatesh said.