The South African doctor who discovered the Omicron variant has suggested the UK may be panicking unnecessarily about the new Covid strain.
Dr Angelique Coetzee said that patients had been presenting with ‘extremely mild’ symptoms in her country, though the population there is significantly younger than in the UK.
The chair of the South African Medical Association suspects the variant is already widely in the UK but added she had not seen any confirmed cases admitted to hospital – adding that other colleagues had seen the ‘same picture’.
…She listed symptoms of Omicron as extreme tiredness, headaches and a scratchy cough – but not a loss of smell or taste.
METRO
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Several care home residents in Scotland expecting to receive their dose of the coronavirus vaccine were instead injected with salt water.
Some 11 residents at Millbrae Care Home, in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, were mistakenly given a saline solution used to dilute the Pfizer vaccine once removed from freezers, according to the The Sunday Mail.
Trudi Marshall, Health and Social Care North Lanarkshire nurse director, told Metro.co.uk: ‘None of the residents who received the vaccine diluent came to any harm and they were re-vaccinated on the same day.
Under-40s may be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after blood clot reports doubled, reports claim.
The chance of dying from a blood clot after having the jab is about one in one million – with 19 fatalities from around 20 million vaccinations. However, the total number of people in the UK who developed blood clots after getting one dose has gone from 79 to 168 in a fortnight, Medical Healthcare Products and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) data suggests.
A Covid vaccination site shuttered its doors early after 13 patients suffered bad reactions to their shots. The mass vaccination event at Dick’s Sporting Goods Part in Commerce Field, Colorado, was halted on Wednesday, with two patients taken to hospital for further evaluation.
Nearly three times as many people are now dying of flu and pneumonia than with coronavirus in England and Wales, new figures have revealed.
Numbers published by the Office For National Statistics show 917 flu and pneumonia deaths were registered for the week ending on July 10.
In comparison, 366 people died that week after testing positive for Covid-19 – the lowest number of deaths involving the virus in the last 16 weeks and a 31.2% decrease compared with the previous week, which saw 532 deaths.
Overall, the number of deaths registered in the same week was 6.1% (560 deaths) below the five-year average – the fourth consecutive week it has been below average.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/22/nearly-three-times-people-dying-flu-pneumonia-coronavirus-13021417/