 You're watching News Made Easy. I'm Anindya Chakravarty. Omicron is exploding in India. In Delhi, it is spreading and Mumbai. It's spreading extremely fast and must be spreading in other parts of India as well. It's only in the cities that genome sequencing is being done of the samples. And that is why it's easier to make out whether it's Omicron or whether it's the old Delta. And you know that the Delhi health minister recently said that 84% of the cases that have come up in the last two days. And remember that's when the numbers have exploded are of Omicron variety. He also said that it's milder than Delta and we know that. Not just from India but from across the world. And why is this both bad news because it's spreading so fast but also very good news? Because the spread will mean that many more people will get infected. Within a household for instance, if someone has Omicron right now, they are three times more likely to spread it to someone else in their own home than they had if they had Delta. Three times. And Delta was pretty transmissible as well. It was very contagious. So Omicron can also, as some people have said, come through a whiff of air that comes through to you. If you're unmasked or your mask is not properly worn. So chances are spreading are very, very high. We're seeing that happy record numbers across the world every single day. But hospitalizations have dropped. Deaths have dropped. And there has been a lag. Deaths in hospitalization lag by 7 and to 15 days sometimes by a month. We've had almost two months of Omicron right now. It was first discovered in November in South Africa where it went up and then went down. And in most cases it was pretty mild in the US and UK. It came pretty early by the end of November and throughout December it went, kept rising. And the data from there again tells us that it is much milder than Delta was. And the first things that we've heard from labs even before this real world studies and data could be collected was already encouraging. And there is something called the Syrian hamster. Now hamsters are used in labs. Unfortunate creatures for testing and for looking at the progress of various diseases. And the Syrian hamster, a particular variety of hamster which is used in labs was very susceptible to COVID. All other variants showed very severe symptoms of COVID with all other variants except Omicron where its symptoms have been pretty mild. And in fact if someone hamster had already been infected by a SARS-CoV-2 variant, a COVID variant before, earlier even 50 days later they showed virtually no symptoms. So that was the first lab data which was showing that this is a milder version. There is data about hamsters are different from human beings and the studies from human beings would be different. But there is a study from Hong Kong for instance which took lung tissue taken from surgeries. Discarded lung parts from surgeries. It took it and they tested and they found that inside the lung, Omicron replicates or reproduces 10 times slower than Delta or the Alpha variant, the original variant. And what that means is that our body's immune system gets much more time to fight it which they didn't find with Delta. When Delta replicated, it replicated very fast inside the lung and then when our immune system attacked it, it not just attacked the infected cells, destroyed the infected cells but it also killed cells which were not infected. It went into an overdrive and that caused runaway inflammation inside the lungs causing the people to become breathless, inability to breathe, they didn't get enough oxygen and ultimately various organs started failing, clots formed and that's how many deaths took place. And that is also one reason why so many people needed oxygen support during Delta. In the case of Omicron, that is not happening. On the other hand, it multiplies much, much faster in the upper respiratory tract which means that because the presence is so much more, it's going to be much more contagious. It's very, very likely that you'll spread it to someone else who's not masked and cannot stop these viruses from entering or protect themselves to a certain extent from entering. So that's the reason it is very, very contagious but it is much less lethal when it comes to the lungs. So the chances of you getting Omicron is very high but chances of you getting a severe disease are relatively low. I'm not saying it is not there but it is relatively low. One real world, the largest real world data that we have is from the UK where they took about 5.3 lakh odd Omicron cases and 5.7 lakh Delta cases and compared what the impact is. And they found that chances of being hospitalized is about 50% lower with Omicron. Chances of getting hospitalized, being hospitalized reduces drastically. If you've got two doses of the COVID vaccine, it goes down to between 65-70% and if you've had a booster dose of the third dose, then the chances of being hospitalized drops by 80% or more, 80-90%. Now that is a significant difference. These are significant differences which make a huge difference to how lethal, how dangerous the disease itself is because influenza also causes deaths as you know, influenza also causes hospitalization. So if Omicron turns out to be like that, then it is significantly not very different from a seasonal flu or even a common cold which is caused by more than 200 odd viruses every year, rhinoviruses and various kinds of coronaviruses which are not deadly. Our body is immune to them. So one of the good things about Omicron is that it spreads very quickly. In most cases the symptoms will be mild if at all. Omicron 80% of cases turn out to be asymptomatic as one study has shown in the UK which is compared to 40% of cases in Delta. So 60% of people who got Delta showed some symptom, severe or moderate or mild. In Omicron only 20% show any symptom and most are mild. Now you look at Delhi for instance and you as I told you that in Delhi, the health minister has said that Omicron is about 84% of the new cases in the last two days. These are early days. There are approximately on 3rd of January. There were approximately 11,000 cases in Delhi out of which only 7 were on ventilator support and 120 odd were on oxygen support. So again these are significant numbers because we do not know how many of these people on oxygen support are on ventilator because they have COVID caused by Delta or because they have Omicron. So we don't know whether even one of them is there because of Omicron. In the UK for instance, one-third of those who are in ICUs are people who are there with COVID. They are in ICU because of some other ailment. They were already in the hospital. So they are with COVID. They are not in ICU because of COVID. So that itself is interesting because the chances of needing ICU support or emergency support is one-third of Delta and those who have been diagnosed with Omicron inside ICUs are not there because of Omicron but because of some other ailment. So clearly the severity of the disease is significantly lower than Delta which was obviously much worse than the Alpha variant, the first variant that we saw. Now what does that mean? That means that Omicron could just rush through the population very quickly cause very few people to have symptoms, significant symptoms and in a poor country like India where a cough and cold is not even treated as a symptom. You don't get an off day for having a sore throat or cough and cold. There's a very high chance that most people won't even know that they're infected but they'll get a significant amount of immunity, natural immunity from a milder version of the disease which is not very different from going and getting a vaccine where you have some mild symptoms, a bit of a headache, maybe some mild fever, body ache. So it's not very different from being vaccinated and getting immunity is to get an Omicron immunity. Again, let me warn and give this health warning that these are still early days. The data is coming in increasingly. The good thing about that is that the data, the interpretation assessment of Omicron has not changed from what it was in the early days in South Africa to what it is now in the UK and the US based on new data. Now it is a less deadly version. If you look at what the German Health Minister has said, remember in the middle of December he had given a warning that this could cause a massive problem to the health system. Recently in the last few days he has said that it is much milder. We're seeing lower number of ICU cases. Maybe they will drop pretty soon. And he's also said that masking helps with dealing with Omicron because it has, those with Omicron have a lower viral load. Don't ask me what that means but this is what has been reported in the papers that that is what will protect people. So masking, making sure that your mask is tight, it could help you from Omicron. Provided that it is actually, you know, virtuous to be protected from Omicron, whether it is desirable to be protected from Omicron. If Omicron is not going to create a severe disease in most people, perhaps it is better for Omicron to create immunity instead. It is not going to go away. It's going to stay. It is going to be there but it is not going to cause a deadly disease. So if Omicron spreads, replaces Delta and other versions and you get immunity because of that, even if Delta comes up every now and then over series and even a deadly version of it comes back every now and then, there will be a higher degree of immunity in the population for the health system to deal with it. Because after all, you know, every year it is true that flus happen and people die of influenza. People die of various other reasons of viruses. The severe disease is caused. Sometimes those with compromised lungs are sent to hospitals. They need oxygen simply because of catching a cold. So this will happen. It's not going to disappear but it is possible that this could be the end game for COVID-19. Omicron could end up being the milder version which kills and removes all of the less mild, the more deadly versions. So this is the show today. Keep watching. News click. Do like this video and share it as well.