"Omikron leads us back to normality": Virologist Stöhr sees two alternatives before the Corona summit

Created: 01/06/2022, 09:08 AM

From: Sebastian Horsch

Omikron is already the predominant variant in many countries.

The virologist Klaus Stöhr explains what will happen in Germany in the next few weeks.

Munich - Virologist Klaus Stöhr worked as head of the global influenza program for the World Health Organization and in vaccine development for Novartis.

Today he works as a freelance consultant.

Mr. Stöhr, Omikron is at the door.

What will happen in Germany in the next few weeks?

Prediction is relatively easy.

Denmark already has an incidence ten times as high as Germany, England almost eight times as high.

We will soon have much higher numbers of infections, but, as in other countries, there will be a gap between many mild cases and, at the same time, significantly fewer hospital admissions.

In England, Omikron brought almost four times more cases, but also about a half the probability of getting seriously ill.

These scissors lead us back to normal.

Because it shows that the virus is doing what we expected.

In fact?

It adapts to the person.

The incubation time is reduced and it increasingly multiplies in the nose and throat and not in the lungs.

The gradients tend to be easier.

Because mild diseases mean a better spread for viruses.

One more word about the contagiousness of Omikron: Although the virus is constantly referred to as “highly infectious”, it is in the same league as influenza, for example.

It is time to communicate more rationally here.

How do you rate the danger of Omikron for children?

If the illnesses become milder in adults, it is biologically to be expected that the same will apply to children.

There is now a new, resilient publication according to which the burden of disease for children is reduced by around half.

On Friday there is again a federal-state summit.

Do we need further contact restrictions?

To answer that, you have to define your goal.

If you want to prevent as many infections as possible, you need more restrictions.

But if you want to prevent difficult courses above all, that is, to keep hospitals and cemeteries empty, I see no reason for that.

The increase in mild courses is decoupled from a higher burden on the hospitals.

Even if some voluntarily unvaccinated people in particular could be hit hard, the figures from other countries do not indicate any overload in the clinics.

"There are still false expectations in many minds"

What if a lot of staff in the clinics get sick at the same time?

Of course, if necessary, you have to respond to this, for example by shortening the quarantine.

But now some are pretending that protecting critical infrastructure is a completely new challenge.

It is part of every pandemic plan - an ongoing process that has to be scaled and adapted again and again depending on the situation.

A look abroad.

Spain was just a model country because of its high vaccination rate, now it is fully in the next Corona wave.

Why does the situation keep changing so quickly?

In many minds there are still false expectations: Those who work well are, like in a castle, safe from the virus in the long term. But that's not how it works in a pandemic. Waves move up and down. That depends on the one hand on the season and on the other hand on the population dynamics. For a period of six to eight weeks, many become infected, especially in the cold, wet months, because the conditions are then good for the virus. After that, the wave reaches the apex. First of all, there are no more recipients because each person only has a limited number of contacts. The wave flattens out again. Then there is a new mix of populations and the next wave begins. When it comes back towards summer, the infection process breaks off sharply and the viruses only continue to circulate at a low level.

How much influence can we then have on the course of the pandemic?

The aim of fighting a pandemic is basically to achieve the inevitable contamination of the population with minimal damage.

The end result is the same everywhere: all people are infected or immunized.

The question is what losses a country suffers in order to get there - health, social, economic.

But vaccines were first introduced in this pandemic.

That is why it made a lot of sense to delay the spread until these vaccines were available to as many as possible in order to minimize serious disease and deaths - they cannot be completely prevented in the long term. But due to the still strict measures last summer, for example, many infections in Germany were only postponed into winter. In a pandemic, however, you can only ever choose between two evils - you cannot get through without harm. And at the end of the day you will be billed. Then it becomes apparent who at the beginning of the pandemic already had the end in mind, planned for the long term and arrived with the least impact. But who, like Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder, swept control alternatives off the table with the position,that any illness or death from infection in a pandemic is morally unacceptable has always lived in a different universe.

Interview: Sebastian Horsch - * Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA

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