Karla returned to work last Monday, after 14 days of sick leave due to COVID-19. It is the second time that he has been infected, this time with Ómicron, despite the fact that he already has the complete vaccination schedule. As she works in an agency of the Public Ministry, it has not been an option for her to work from home during the pandemic, and it has been precisely in her work space where she has been infected. The first time was in December 2020, right in the second wave. “We continue to go normally, a policeman was the one who started the contagion and five colleagues were infected in those same weeks,” he says. At the beginning of this 2022, he felt the symptoms again – without loss of smell and taste – but this time there are at least 16 infected colleagues.
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The Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been shown to be more contagious than its predecessors, but less virulent.
“I started on Saturday, January 8, I started with a burning throat, and by Tuesday I already had cold symptoms, but only that, but since they told us that day that two colleagues tested positive, I took the test and it came out positive. But it didn’t get worse, it was just a throat infection and some tiredness,” says the 29-year-old. The Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been shown to be more contagious than the past, but not more virulent. In Mexico, only in the first days of the year, the cases went from 3 million 988,916 to more than 4 million 700,000, which broke record records in 24 hours. This has happened in a similar way in other regions of the world such as South Africa and Europe. On November 26, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified this variant B.1.1.529, called Omicron, as of “concern” due to the various mutations it presented and that could affect the characteristics of the virus, for example, its ease of propagation. Since then, studies are being carried out to learn more about its characteristics, from its transmissibility, virulence and effectiveness to vaccines, as well as reinfections. Among them, the one from Imperial College in London, which pointed out that with the Delta variant, there was 85% protection against contracting the coronavirus again, but in the case of Ómicron it is 19%. Roxana Trejo, an expert in epidemiology and infection control, points out that what has been observed with Ómicron is that there is the ability to reinfect people who already had a primary disease due to another variant of SARS-CoV-2. “We have detected that for every 100 people who were infected, four can be reinfected, it is an average, although it all depends on the individual,” he commented at the seminar 4th wave of COVID-19: Reinfection and new variants.
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FOLLOWING
Among these cases, who had a primary infection with another variant and have been infected again with Ómicron, in addition to Karen, is Abril, a 27-year-old student, who was infected in July 2020, and again last January. “I got infected for the second time in a meeting, after that I waited 15 days of isolation. When the 15 days were up, I went to take the test to make sure that I was no longer infected,” she says. The young woman explains that at first she did not know that she was infected, but until the other people she was with began to test positive and with symptoms similar to hers: sore and itchy throat at the same time, cough, hoarse voice, but more milder than the first time in which, in addition to these symptoms, he had a headache and felt “too weak” to the point that he thought that at any moment he would “collapse”. At that time, she was infected because during her school break, she decided to work in a sewing factory, where there were no adequate protection measures. Like them, the possibility of getting infected has been growing. Experts estimate that by the middle of the year, half of the population will be infected, even reinfected, which has opened the door for it to be possible. the end of the health emergency , largely also by vaccination.
The Undersecretary of Health, Hugo López-Gatell, insisted that Ómicron is a variant that produces the milder COVID-19 disease and, although it spreads rapidly, giving a large number of cases, they are not serious cases. “This, added to a high proportion of people who have been vaccinated, certainly allows for a much more manageable epidemic, never desirable, but much more manageable and will eventually cause immunity in a large proportion of people, which could eventually contribute to the end of the epidemic period, not only in Mexico, but in the world”, he stated in El Pulso de la Salud. “The contagions are increasing every day, I do not blame anyone in this sense, everyone is free to believe (anti-vaccines) and profess what they want but, due to these differences between people, the contagion spreads more and more every day. I feel that it is not about measures, each virus has its nature,” says Abril, who has already come out of the second infection, but with consequences. For her part, Karla –whose infections were due to labor issues– points out that people in general are a “little fed up with the running of the bulls”, but the only thing she says as a reproach is that people go out without caution and do not use face masks, since she considers that “life must be normalized, always with precautions”. “We cannot lock ourselves up again, and yes, I think I would venture to say that we are all going to get infected, so that it really becomes an endemic virus and affects health less and less,” he maintains.