 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The Omicron strain of COVID-19 continues to spread quickly across the world. Cities such as New York and London are especially hard hit. On December 23rd, the UK recorded 120,000 cases, while the previous day, the US recorded over 230,000 cases. Meanwhile, there are hopeful reports which say that the peak in South Africa may have passed. The spread of the new strain takes place during the holiday season, in many parts of the world, and even as people's behaviour has relaxed over the past few months. As the strain spreads, fresh discussions have emerged about vaccines. While poorer countries and those in the global South still need to vaccinate a large part of their populations, richer countries are focusing on booster shots for their already vaccinated people. How do we understand the spread of Omicron? What does the available data show? How are countries dealing with issues around the vaccine? Immunologists Dr Satyajit Rath explains. We are going to talk about the most recent status of the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 that is spreading COVID-19 with renewed speed and concern across large parts of the world. Clearly, the evidence is now quite emphatic that the Omicron strain spreads in communities at a much faster rate than even the Delta strain did. We need to keep a number of differences in mind between this time last year versus this time six months ago versus today. In terms of different conditions, this time last year, the world was far more concerned, was far more COVID-appropriate behaviour. Six months ago, we were across the world in large suites, undergoing very rapid spread of the Delta strain. So compared to that, until last month, we had all across the world begun to breathe again, begun to withdraw even further from COVID-appropriate behaviour, begun to gather in large numbers again, thinking that vaccination, particularly across the developed world, is likely to have brought the pandemic under control. And it's quite possible that that shift in community behaviours has fed the very rapid spread of the Omicron strain of the virus. However, there is also laboratory evidence that the Omicron strain does transmit and does grow much more rapidly. So there is likely to be a whole range of reasons for the rapid spread that we are seeing of the Omicron strain in South Africa, in the United Kingdom, as well as now in the United States and in countries in continental Europe. That said, there is this indication that the Omicron strain in South Africa appeared to be causing relatively less severe illness. South African researchers were cautious in pointing out that this had to be seen in the context that unvaccinated people catching the Omicron strain in South Africa were likely to be relatively young and non-comorbid because that's the group that hasn't as yet gotten vaccination, the elderly and the comorbid who were catching Omicron were a little more likely to be vaccinated in South Africa. And therefore, as an outcome of this, it may be that the Omicron strain was showing up as causing relatively mild illness. Data from the United Kingdom are now beginning to show that this may be the case, even though the data are very preliminary with very different numbers being compared between the Delta variant cases and the Omicron variant cases. But nonetheless, there is some evidence emerging that what the South African researchers had thought of may in fact be real. In other words, that if the Omicron strain begins to spread in unvaccinated communities containing a fair proportion of the elderly and comorbid, then it is likely to cause severe illness with the same likelihood. And if that's the case, then national health authorities across the global South need to worry and need to plan for this. That said, there is a little bit of evidence from laboratory studies in Hong Kong that suggest that the Omicron strain tends to grow much better in the upper airways as compared to the lower airways and the lungs. And that may lead to it causing severe illness with somewhat lower likelihood. And if so, that would be to our advantage in terms of healthcare policies. Finally, the issue of whether we should be expanding basic COVID vaccination or we should be expanding booster vaccination is an absolutely black irony and an awful choice that we have landed ourselves with. We have spent the last year in vaccination campaigns across the world. And if we had committed to a globally integrated vaccination campaign where we steadily vaccinated the susceptible, the at-risk groups, the healthcare professionals and related at-risk professionals, the elderly, the comorbid, the adults and then children across the world, not based on nationalities but based on who needs it, then we would not have been in this situation where we have to make this awful choice of whether to expand the basic vaccination across much of the global South, which doesn't have access to that basic vaccination or to begin giving booster doses in a display of reasonable but nonetheless vaccine nationalism. And in this, as a final point, what needs to be remembered is that the evidence, the strong evidence of the effectiveness of all current COVID vaccines is that they prevent serious illness and death, hospitalization of death. The evidence that they slow down transmission of infection in communities is much more fragmentary and much weaker, yet it is that evidence that national health authorities are using to give booster doses. And we are therefore in this situation of not having sufficient vaccine doses even now in the WHO Covax Initiative for distribution to very large numbers of countries in the global South. This is a situation that we in terms of the global elites controlling these policies have brought upon ourselves that all of us in the global South particularly need to remember.