They can continue and exceed our population by double or tripple infecting a person which are actually proven cases in South Africa. Omicron is an Escape-Mutation which means it is infecting people who were e.g. infected and recovered from the Delta variant.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/2326...ity-from-past/

A pandemic situation is marked through its dynamic behavior. A pandemic rule says: Never say never. This you can observe by omicron and its much higher potential to infect compared to Delta variant.

It`s imaginable that a case rate can continue to expand by a factor of ten as well as it is imaginable that it can continue to expand by a factor of 100.

Omicron is in 77 countries with a spreading rate (exponentially growth) no other corona variant showed up to now. Even if it will be evidentially true that omicron infects people with mostly mild symptoms the sheer number of cases could overcome health systems of these 77 countries.

Check this graph and compare the share and growth of omicron variant in all analyzed sequences in South Africa/Botswana starting at Nov 1, 2021 to other countries starting at Nov29, 2021.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/c...SA~ZAF~BWA~AUS

The fear of a exponentially case growth like this accelerated through omicron is actual the reason why Austria tighted their rules and why The Netherlands went into lookdown and why many other countries will follow with different measures in the next weeks.

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