Lauterbach reports new Omikron data from England - "News not good"
Created: 12/19/2021, 4:45 PM
From: Jonas Raab
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has been warning of the Omikron variant of the coronavirus for days, referring to its spread in Great Britain.
Now he delivers numbers.
Berlin / London - Karl Lauterbach currently has the island firmly in view. The reason: Omicron. The health minister recently warned of a “massive fifth wave” and a situation “that we have not yet had in this form”. As a justification, he referred to the situation in Great Britain. There, the number of omicron cases is now doubling every one or two days. Now the SPD politician reports to Twitter with new England news and does away with a widespread assumption about the new virus mutation.
When Lauterbach recently visited a vaccination center in Hanover, he said, referring to Omikron, that the situation is unfortunately still underestimated.
British colleagues had told him that the situation on the island exceeded everything they had seen so far in the course of the pandemic.
Lauterbach explained why this is so in four tweets.
Lauterbach warns of the Corona variant on Twitter: "Nobody should underestimate Omikron"
“Nobody should underestimate Omikron,” wrote the minister on Friday (December 17), sharing a report in the British newspaper
The Guardian
with
the words “Omikron tsunami”
with his Twitter followers.
In the article, experts explain that they expect a million new infections per day in Great Britain from the Omikron variant by the end of the year.
According to the
Guardian
,
whether the British health system can cope with the Omikron wave depends
primarily on the proportion of hospital admissions among new infections.
It is said again and again that omicrons lead to less severe disease processes.
However, there has not yet been any reliable data on this.
New findings on corona mutation: Lauterbach shares Omikron report from Great Britain
On Saturday Lauterbach then reported with new messages from Great Britain. They are not good. Lauterbach shared an Omikron report from the National Health Service (NHS), the state health system in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The report is very significant, said Lauterbach. It shows for the first time that it is unlikely that Omicron infections would be significantly milder than those with other corona variants. Accordingly, there is no difference in the risk of hospitalization.
Only a short time later, Lauterbach shared a short video in the short message service that shows the number of corona cases in London since October 1 and broken down by virus variant.
While the graph of the delta variant increases jagged and slowly in proportion, the omicron graph shoots up to three times the delta cases within days at the beginning of December.
“Impressive,” wrote Lauterbach.
Lauterbach looks to Great Britain because of Omikron: "News not good"
Just a few hours later, Lauterbach spoke up again on Twitter by sharing a thread from Ewan Birney, Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute at EMBL in Hinxton.
In it, the biologist summarized the corona situation in Great Britain.
Lauterbach's verdict: "Excellent thread" and "worth reading", said the Minister of Health, "news but not good."
In order to stay below the number of deaths of the first and second wave at Omikron, the highly contagious new virus variant should only be 10 to 30 percent as deadly as Delta.
"But according to new data from the UK, that is still unlikely," said Lauterbach.
(yo)
