Omicron patients experienced severe headache, body pain, tiredness and mild fever unlike the common flu-like symptoms of Covid-19, said Dr Angelique Coetzee, one of the physicians who first flagged the highly mutated strain in South Africa.
Dr Coetzee, who has physically seen over 100 Covid positive patients in South Africa infected with the new variant, told News18.com that “Omicron will give a totally different clinical picture that has no flu-like symptoms.”
“Our patients don’t have a cough, runny nose, high fever or sore throat – the classic symptoms of Covid-19 we knew till date,” she said while adding that the main complaints are severe headache, body pain, exhaustion, mild temperature and slightly scratchy throat.”
The headache and body pain can be “severe” if the patient is unvaccinated. However, she added that it is manageable at home with commonly used medicines.
Dr Coetzee, who is also the Chairperson of the South African Medical Association, an association for public and private sector health practitioners, said “a clinician would be able to judge that the patient is not acutely ill.”
“Place a high suspicion if symptoms such as body pain, headache, fatigue are mentioned. It may not be a normal flu but Omicron. Ask them to test for Covid-19,” she said.
While her patients have been responding well to the drugs such as ibuprofen and are recovering within five to seven days, she believes that “more data is required to confirm the behaviour of Omicron.”
Does Omicron Impact Children?
According to Dr. Coetzee, the data with South Africa shows that children have also contracted the Omicron virus.
“Beginning of the wave, children and young people who were already admitted in the hospital due to other respiratory tract infections were tested. Some of them had tested positive but that doesn’t mean that due to Omicron caused infection, they were admitted,” she clarified.
The top symptoms, which occur in children affected by Omicron are slightly different than those which the adults experience.
“Here children will have sore throat unlike adults’ scratchy throat,” she added.
“They also have an elevated pulse rate of around 100 to 115 beats per minute followed by a slight increase in body temperature. While they may not feel well, they recover quite fast. In one case, the child recovered in just 48 hours.”
Delta More Aggressive than Omicron
South African patients, who were first detected with Omicron, are currently in their fourth clinical week and have not reported any death so far.
Omicron’s clinical period passed without reporting any severity or death is encouraging as the Delta variant was capable of making people extremely sick mostly by the end of first week or within 10 days.
“Omicron is highly transmissible but it seems to cause mild disease. By this time, during the Delta wave, we had asked our government to close down schools and other get-togethers… When we were three weeks into the Delta, the severity of the disease was much more.”
Even with people who have a certain set of underlying health conditions but are vaccinated, she said, the infection with the latest mutated variant has remained mild.
How Did South Africa Detect Omicron?
Dr Coetzee, who has been a clinical physician for over three decades, recalled that she and her other medical colleagues had not seen Covid-19 cases for nearly four to eight weeks.
“Then people started coming with different symptoms. We immediately knew it was not the Delta variant… they were not its symptoms.”
“The RT-PCR test also showed the difference,” she recalled. Scientists did the sequencing and found the new strain, she added.
“We clearly told the world that we had just seven days of clinical picture.”
Based out of Pretoria, South Africa, she said the doctors there “were still waiting for people to get into a cytokine storm which might make them extremely ill.”
In Delta, that period starts in almost 10 days of catching the infection.
However, she added, “Till now, it seems quite mild but we have a very limited sample size to conclude anything.”
Responding to the death of at least one person in the United Kingdom due to the Omicron variant, the doctor said, “The UK is very worried. It is difficult to imagine that the Omicron variant will behave differently from what we are seeing in SA.”
She expressed the urgent need to collate and share data with other countries.
“I am not sure if people across the globe would get the mild disease. There must be people who get the severe disease. But here, out of 100 patients, I haven’t seen even a single patient who has worsened or deteriorated after 5-7 days of home based treatment unlike Delta.”
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