“I started on Saturday, January 8, I started with a burning throat, and by Tuesday I already had cold symptoms, but only that, but since they told us that day that two colleagues tested positive, I took the test and it came back positive. But it didn’t get worse, it was just a throat infection and some tiredness,” says the 29-year-old.
The Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been shown to be more contagious than the past, but not more virulent. In Mexico, only in the first days of the year, the cases went from 3 million 988,916 to more than 4 million 700,000, which broke record records in 24 hours. This has happened in a similar way in other regions of the world such as South Africa and Europe.
On November 26, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified this variant B.1.1.529, called Omicron, as of “concern” due to the various mutations it presented and that could affect the characteristics of the virus, for example, its ease of propagation.
Since then, studies are being carried out to learn more about its characteristics, from its transmissibility, virulence and effectiveness to vaccines, as well as reinfections. Among them, the one from Imperial College in London, which pointed out that with the Delta variant, there was 85% protection against contracting the coronavirus again, but in the case of Ómicron it is 19%.
Roxana Trejo, an expert in epidemiology and infection control, points out that what has been observed with Ómicron is that there is the ability to reinfect people who already had a primary disease due to another variant of SARS-CoV-2. “We have detected that for every 100 people who were infected, four can be reinfected, it is an average, although everything depends on the individual,” he commented at the seminar 4th wave COVID-19: Reinfection and new variants.
