Doctors hope Omicron causes milder cases of Covid — but it’s still too early to say

Physicians around the world have suggested the Omicron variant may cause milder illness than other forms of the coronavirus. But actually understanding Omicron’s severity is an open question, experts caution — one that requires more patient data and more time to answer.

The South African physician Angelique Coetzee told the BBC this weekend, for example, that the cases she and colleagues were seeing weren’t serious. “We haven’t admitted anyone,” she said. In Israel, one doctor told Haaretz that, “if it continues this way, this might be a relatively mild illness compared to the Delta variant.”

But sussing out a change in severity in a pathogen — particularly if it’s a small change — can be difficult, in part because so many other factors influence outcomes. There’s the changing virus, but there’s also the age range of the people in a certain place, their rates of underlying conditions that make them more vulnerable to Covid-19, vaccination coverage, access to treatments, and what local health systems look like. Different hospitals have different practices for how sick a patient has to be to be admitted, for example, and when hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid patients, their outcomes can be worse.