How Mild Is Omicron Really?

Early reports that Omicron causes less-severe disease than Delta seem to be borne out, but it’s not yet clear to what extent that’s due to the variant itself versus the populations it’s infecting.

Written byDan Robitzski

| 9 min read

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Update (May 5, 2022): A preprint currently under review at Nature suggests that the Omicron variant may be as severe as previous variants when variables such as vaccination status are controlled for, according to Reuters.

When the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 first began to spread rapidly and outcompete other variants in late 2021, it quickly became apparent that the variant was quite different than those that came before it.

Unlike Delta, which emerged in December 2020 and was linked to a massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths last year, Omicron didn’t seem to be as dangerous on the scale of individual infected people. Yet hospitals, clinics, and intensive care units have still filled up with patients as the tally of new cases and hospitalizations, currently at more than 145,000 in the United States, shattered records day after day, in no small part because a series of mutations in the virus’s ...

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Meet the Author

Dan Robitzski
Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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