The Omicron variant of the coronavirus caused 98 percent of all infections last week, Hungary’s chief medical officer said on Thursday, and called on Hungarians to take the third jab to bolster protection, which she said waned four months after the second jab.
Cecília Müller told news channel M1 that the “stealth” subvariant of omicron, which is more difficult to detect than other subvariants, is more infectious than other subvariants but its clinical symptoms are similar.
Meanwhile, trace amounts of the coronavirus in waste water, an indicator of trends of the epidemic in the coming weeks, stagnated last week, Müller said.
The method was developed by Hungary’s National Public Health Centre (NNK), and the WHO is recommending it for use in other countries,
Müller said.
Altogether 99 patients died of a Covid-related illness in the past 24 hours, while 12,885 new coronavirus infections were registered, koronavirus.gov.hu said on Thursday. So far 6,376,902 people have received a first jab, while 6,127,609 have been double-jabbed. Fully 3,746,680 Hungarians have received a booster shot.
The number of active infections stands at 231,613, while
hospitals are treating 5,198 Covid-19 patients, 198 of whom are intubated on a ventilator.
Since the first outbreak, 1,684,432 have been registered with the virus, while 42,269 deaths have been recorded. Fully 1,410,550 people have made a recovery.
A nice fairytale. The NNK did NOT develop the tracking pathogens in wastewater (the US was using a wastewater method in the 1940’s to track polio for instance), the NNK did NOT develop the hybridisation of radioactive cDNA probes (also developed in the US to monitor Hepatitis A) and the NNK did NOT develop the gold standard PCR wastewater pathogen detection techniques which came into being in the 1990’s. Further, using wastewater to track Covid was being used in Italy and the Netherlands BEFORE Hungary started tracking the virus in this way.