Public health officials in South Africa do not yet know whether the newly named COVID-19 omicron variant will lead to a big increase in the number of deaths, but they have laboratory evidence suggesting that it is spreading at least as vast as the deadly delta variant.
The laboratory services division at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) runs a large wastewater testing program.
Program managers have found that the amount of COVID-19 virus traces in the samples from Daspoort — a suburb of Pretoria, Gauteng Province, that drains central Pretoria — is close to the amount managers detected in June, or around the time the number of COVID-19 delta cases was peaking in Pretoria.
"The increase reflects increased population-level transmission and is likely to be followed by increased burden of cases and hospitalisations," NICD officials said in a summary of the latest results, which were based on data collected during the week ending Nov. 19.
Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who recently left a position as a researcher at Harvard, highlighted the NICD's wastewater test results in a tweet Sunday.
Pretoria is the capital for the executive branch of South Africa's government, and other countries locate their embassies there.
The delta variant surge, and the strain the surge put on South Africa's health care delivery system, hit Pretoria and the rest of South Africa so hard that male life expectancy at birth at mid-year fell to 59.3 years, from 62.4 years before. Female life expectancy at birth plunged to 64.6 years, from 68.4 years.
What It Means
U.S. life insurers are following the news from South Africa closely.
Any big COVID-19 omicron variant mortality surge in South Africa could have a direct effect on the results of U.S. life insurers with life insurance, life reinsurance or life retrocession business in South Africa.
Reinsurance Group of America noted when it released earnings for the third quarter that the delta variant surge had a surprisingly large impact on results from the company's small operation in South Africa.
An omicron variant mortality surge could also affect life insurers' results in the United States. Some life insurers that had been hoping COVID-19 vaccines would buffer them against the effects of the delta variant have since noted that low vaccination rates in some regions may lead to high mortality levels during COVID-19 surges in those regions.
Some insurers have reported that prices for life insurance, disability insurance and life reinsurance are increasing because of concerns about the pandemic.
Mina suggested, however, that, even if the omicron variant proves to be more severe and better evading vaccines than earlier variants, a new wave will likely be less severe than the earlier waves, because vaccines and people's exposure to earlier variants will likely provide at least some protection against the omicron variant.
The Omicron Variant's Spread
Public health officials in South Africa have detected the omicron variant because the clibrary has a large, sophisticated COVID-19 testing and sample gene sequencing program. Officials are debating whether the variant originated in South Africa or a nearby country, or whether the variant might have come to Africa from somewhere else in the world.
