Omicron symptoms ‘totally different’ from Delta COVID-19 variant: South African doctor

The South African doctor who identified the Omicron variant of COVID-19 says its symptoms seem milder than previous variants of the disease.

Many questions about the newly discovered Omicron COVID-19 variant remain unanswered, but some evidence is emerging to suggest that it might not present the same way as other strains of the disease.

Patients with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 look very different than those infected with previous variants like Delta, says the chair of South Africa’s medical association.

“It’s totally different from the Delta,” Dr. Angelique Coetzee told Global News on Tuesday. She said that these patients aren’t displaying the same loss of taste and smell, need for supplemental oxygen or elevated pulse rate that doctors noted with Delta patients.

“It’s very much like a cold or flu type of symptoms,” she said, adding that patients are reporting headaches and body aches, and a slight sore throat.

“They don’t have a severe cough and they don’t have a running or blocked nose as you would see with an upper respiratory tract infection,” she said.

Overall, patients appear to be less sick than those in previous waves of COVID-19, Coetzee said, although generally speaking, severe illness seems to lag a few weeks behind infections, and the data is very new.

This fits with the findings of a very small study released Dec. 4 looking at patients at a hospital located in Gauteng Province in South Africa, the epicentre of an Omicron outbreak, who tested positive for the new variant. Researchers looked at just 42 patients admitted over two weeks, Nov. 14-29, 2021.

These patients tended to be younger than in previous waves, with more than 80 per cent of them under the age of 50.