 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The new year has begun with COVID-19 case numbers soaring in many countries across the world. On December 4th, over 1.3 million cases were recorded globally with over 425,000 from the US alone. The Omicron variant's rapid spread has once again put pressure on health systems and governments. Data is beginning to emerge from a number of sources regarding the nature of the variant, and experts are coming up with provisional answers regarding some of the key questions. Is the Omicron variant less severe than earlier ones? Will it lead to fewer deaths? Are the number of cases likely to rise quickly and then fall, as was seen in South Africa? Dr Satyajit Rath talks about what the data says regarding his questions. He also analyzes what are the strategies we have to combat this fast spreading variant. We're looking at this week's progress in the various facets of the COVID-19 pandemic and a couple of trends have now steadily emerged. The first is that the Omicron variant, which has been spreading in patch by patch by growing patch across the world, clearly has the capacity to spread much more rapidly than previous variants or previous virus strains. In fact, when the Omicron strain begins growing in a neighborhood or in a community, numbers tend to skyrocket. This has been true in South Africa. It has been true in the United Kingdom. It has been true in the US. It has been true across the world in a number of places where Omicron local community transmission has stayed in hold. The interesting finding that has gotten steadily more and more reinforced from South Africa is that after the first extraordinarily rapid rise in case numbers, particularly in northern province, case numbers have slowly declined, not exactly at the same rapid rate, but fairly rapidly. The Omicron case numbers have declined. Whether this is going to be true of other Omicron outbreaks or not, in the UK, for example, or in the United States or in South Korea, in Canada, remains to be seen. We've had some fall in case numbers in European and North American countries, but it's quite possible that that is in part explained by smaller test numbers because of the holiday season. The test percentage positivity rates have steadily increased. So the jury is still out on whether they will follow the South African trend of falling case numbers. So the question has always been, again, building on South African numbers, whether the Omicron strain actually is much more likely to cause mild illness and much less likely to cause severe illness. That's what the South African initial data began to show and that's what the South African numbers have continued to show. Increasingly across Europe and North America, this has again been the case, hospitalization numbers, although they have risen, have not risen anywhere at the same rate at which infection numbers have risen, saying again that the Omicron strain is causing severe illness in far fewer proportions of cases. There are possibly two separate and non-exclusive reasons for this. One is that the Omicron strain is capable of reinfecting people who have already been infected earlier with earlier strains and is also capable to some extent of infecting vaccinated people. And yet in both these categories, it's quite likely that illness due to the Omicron strain remains relatively mild. This would mean that it's not so much that the Omicron strain has become mild. It's just that the people in whom Omicron is spreading have become a little more resistant and therefore severe illness in them has become less in proportion. This is quite plausible and likely to be true. But the other component of these reasons is that it's possible that the Omicron strain is actually biologically sufficiently altered so that it doesn't cause severe illness as frequently. And over the past week, 10 days, evidence has emerged from a wide variety of scientific groups across the world, starting with researchers from Hong Kong and now from European, Japanese, North American research groups, suggesting that the Omicron strain may in fact be less likely to cause severe illness. And that evidence is therefore quite interesting. The evidence is in two parts. Number one, the Omicron strain seems to infect the upper airway tubes, the nose, the throat, the upper parts of the lung, the airways, much more than way down into the lungs. And yet, severity of illness is caused by infection lower down in the lungs. And that shift in which the Hong Kong researchers have shown may in part contribute to Omicron causing relatively milder illness. And why exactly does the Omicron strain show this disparity between upper airways and lower airways is not yet clear. There are interesting possibilities being discussed, but none of that has been clarified yet. And finally, the other researchers have shown in animal models in genetically altered mouse models which are susceptible to COVID or in Syrian hamster animals which are susceptible to COVID naturally. In both of them, the Omicron strain causes relatively far more mild illness in these animals than the earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants do. All of this therefore provides some reason to think that the Omicron strain, although it is spreading very widely and extraordinarily rapidly, is likely to be somewhat less of an individual risk in terms of the likelihood of causing severe illness. However, it has to be kept in mind that the speed of transmission and spread of Omicron will mean that even if the percent of people falling severely ill is low, simply because there are explosively huge numbers of people infected, people landing up in hospitals are going to be, those numbers are going to be very high, that will mean that the hospital systems that the critical care systems are going to be stretched thin and are going to be in the tremendous pressure which is going to have effects on how hospitals deal with non-COVID illnesses as well. This is going to be compounded by the fact that if Omicron spreads in previously vaccinated people, then a lot of healthcare workers are going to be infected and will be isolating and therefore availability of healthcare personnel is going to drop. So we are in for difficult times of a different configuration with Omicron than we had with Delta. This is not a, this is not a milder pandemic stage. It's simply a differently configured pandemic stage. And therefore the question to ask is what should we be doing and what we should be doing is completing vaccination because it's clear that vaccination does reduce the likelihood of hospitalization and maintaining COVID appropriate behavior. We've been discussing this regularly that high efficiency masks will provide some measure of improved reduction in the transmission of even a highly efficient transmissible variant like Omicron and therefore use of masks, use of physical distancing and the social solidarity of completing vaccinations is an absolutely required and appropriate COVID appropriate behavior. And that's what we are looking forward to. The final point to make is that everybody is looking at country numbers but we still need to remember that a virus that spreads from breath to breath is going to spread in local community outbreaks. India is an excellent example. Numbers are skyrocketing in the large metropolitan areas of Mumbai and Delhi, not so much in the rest of the country. So everything is not going to rise at the same time. It's going to rise at different rates in different places depending on how community transmission at the local level in communities is taking hold and therefore looking at very broad pictures is likely to be useful only to a certain extent in beginning to understand the trajectory of the pandemic this much for this week. Thank you.