Mild..

 

Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, a leading immunologist has said.

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the government’s life sciences adviser, said that although hospital admissions had increased in recent weeks as Omicron spreads through the population, the disease “appears to be less severe and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital”. Fewer patients were needing high-flow oxygen and the average length of stay was down to three days, he said.

“There is early encouragement from what we know in South Africa that you have fewer hospitalizations and that the number of days that they stay in hospital if they do go into hospital is also lower than in previous variants,” he told the BBC.