An article at Nature today indicates that if a "high risk" person gets very sick from the Omicron version of Covid, it may well be harder to treat:
Strained hospitals bracing for a COVID-19 surge caused by the quickly spreading Omicron variant could face another grim possibility: preliminary experiments suggest that most of the antibody treatments for the disease are powerless against Omicron1,2,3,4.
Doctors use artificial versions of natural antibodies to stave off severe COVID-19 in high-risk people who are infected with the coronavirus. But a slew of publications posted on preprint servers report laboratory evidence that Omicron is totally or partially resistant to all currently available treatments based on these monoclonal antibodies. The publications have not yet been peer reviewed, but some of the companies that manufacture antibody therapies already concede that their products have lower potency against Omicron than against other variants.
I guess the question still is - how many high risk people are going to get seriously sick from it in the first place.
Update: this seems a really good Twitter thread on the good news/bad news about Covid which (as the doctors says) is enough to make your head spin. It includes more detail about the antibody therapies above, as well as the supply issues for other new treatments which seem pretty insurmountable.
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