New Delhi: The South African doctor who raised alarm over the new Covid variant ‘Omicron’, said on Sunday that many of her patients who are suspected to have the new variant have unusual but mild symptoms and have fully recovered without being hospitalized.
Chair of the South African Medical Association, Angelique Coetzee, told AFP, “I seen around 30 patients over the past 10 days who tested positive for Covid-19 but had unfamiliar symptoms”.
“What brought them to the surgery was the extreme tiredness. This was unusual for younger patients. However, most of the patients were men aged under 40.”, she added.
“Just under half were vaccinated. They also had mild muscle aches, a ‘scratchy throat’ and dry cough, only a few had a slightly high temperature”, she explained.
Coetzee further said, “These very mild symptoms were different to other variants. It was quite unfortunate that Omicron had been hyped as ‘this extremely dangerous virus variant’ with multiple mutations while its virulency was still unknown”.
Earlier on Sunday, the Chairperson of Council of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, expressed concern that the new coronavirus strain might be as dangerous as the Ebola virus, and as contagious as the Delta coronavirus variant, Sputnik reported.
