South Africans will probably be able to let down their guard about Covid-19 over the December holiday period, epidemiologist Professor Salim Abdool Karim said this week.

“Our immunity seems to be doing well against the current variant. Provided that there is no new variant, it seems that we will be okay,” he said. 

He added that South Africans’ immunity against the BA.5 subvariant of Omicron, the dominant Sars-COV-2 virus doing the rounds, is holding up “pretty well”.

“Our hybrid immunity (immunity obtained through infection and through vaccination) seems to be protecting us against severe disease and hospitalisation,” he said. “There still are infections, but people are not testing. But we can see that those that do get ill do not go to hospital,” he added.

“I think two things are still important though. If someone is symptomatic they should be tested. It is important to know if you have Covid-19 because you will be contagious because if people are infected then they must isolate.

“They don’t want to go and give other people Covid-19.”

Professor Glenda Gray, president of the Medical Research Council, said she agreed, but reminded people to get their booster vaccines as well.

Head of the Wits Medical School Professor Shabir Madhi said he also doesn’t think there is any reason to stress about Covid-19 this festive season.

“There might be an increase in infections, but not in hospitalisation and deaths. South Africans have extensive immunity against severe illness even if there is a new variant,” he said.

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Professor Francois Venter, the divisional director of Wits University’s health platform, Ezintsha, said there was still a lot of low-level viruses circulating and vulnerable people and especially the elderly, should continue to be careful. “But this certainly is not 2020,” he said. 

According to the latest report from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), in the past week, eight provinces reported a decrease in weekly incidence risk. The NICD stated that people over 80 are still at the highest risk. 

The number of reported Covid-19 cases has dropped by 37.2% week on week. 

The latest testing statistics for the country show a drop of around 33%. The test positivity rate is also lower, at 9.6% (from 11.9% in the previous week). 

According to the latest report by the national genomic surveillance teams, who are scanning samples for possible new variants, Omicron is still the dominant variant and appeared in 100% of samples tested in November.

Subvariant BA.5 and its sublineages were dominant and made up 91% of data.

Apart from routine samples, the scientists in these teams also test samples where someone got infected more than two weeks after receiving the vaccine and especially where vaccinated people are hospitalised. 

They also test patients where there was possible animal-to-human transmission, suspected cases of importation from another country, especially countries known to harbour Sars-CoV-2 variants of concern, or countries with little available information and clusters of “unusual” cases.

BQ.1 and sublineages were detected in September, October and November in 12% of cases but the numbers are low — nine cases in the Western Cape, seven in Gauteng and 1one in the Northern Cape.

In October this was one of the sublineages that the World Health Organization (WHO) was asked to consider declaring a new variant of concern. They, however, declined. The reason given was that the mutations to this sublineage’s spike protein was in the same place as that of BA.5.

At the time there was no data on the severity or possible immune escape for BQ.1. But the virus was spreading faster than the other sublineages in Europe and the United States. 

“It is likely that these additional mutations have conferred an immune escape advantage over other circulating Omicron sublineages, and therefore a higher reinfection risk is a possibility that needs further investigation. At this time there is no epidemiologic data to suggest an increase in disease severity. 

“The impact of the observed immunological changes on vaccine escape remains to be established. Based on currently available knowledge, protection by vaccines (both the index and the recently introduced bivalent vaccines) against infection may be reduced, but no major impact on protection against severe disease is foreseen,” the WHO said in a statement. DM/MC