Earlier on Monday, Dr. Angelique Coetzee, national chair of the South African Medical Association, said Covid-19 case numbers in the country have started to decline. However, the United States and South Africa have key differences, which create "issues with extrapolation" on how the Omicron variant may behave in the two countries, according to Dr. Leana Wen.
"It looks like they were looking at a trajectory of three to four weeks of Omicron really being dominant and driving the number of infections, and now it's trending down again. In the US, there are some issues with extrapolation," Wen explained.
Omicron may take time to get to some parts of the US.
"We have a lot of different parts of the country, including some that are not well-vaccinated. Other parts where it might take a little bit of time for Omicron to get to. So I don't think we could say that the US as a whole will be out of this in three to four weeks. It might be a case of rolling cases, where there are large numbers of infection in parts of the country that then cycle to others," Wen said.
The population makeup is different.
"South Africa has a much younger population. The individuals also who were initially infected tended to be young people. So even if they were unvaccinated, the chance of them becoming severely ill is relatively low. Here in the US, we have not yet seen what happens when Omicron rips through nursing homes, as an example," Wen added.
"I would really hesitate to say that Omicron is somehow going to not cause severe disease in the US even if it hasn't overwhelmed hospital systems in South Africa," she said Monday.
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The latest on the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant - cnn.com
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