The medic was the first to discover Omicron. Early on she saw milder gradients than the previous versions – but she should keep quiet about it.
The South African explorer Omikron-Variant des Coronavirus According to its own statements, at the beginning of the new pandemic wave it was asked not to speak publicly about the milder course of omicron infections. “I was told not to publicly state that it was a mild illness,” said physician Angelique Coetzee of “Welt”. “I was asked to refrain from making such statements and to say that it was a serious illness. I refused.”
“You have to ask your family doctor”
According to Coetzee, he was not put under pressure by the South African authorities, but by European countries. According to the “Welt” report, she named scientists in the Netherlands and Great Britain who had criticized her, referring to the many mutations in the omicron variant, because she had called an omicron infection a mild disease.
“My reports got them off track,” Coetzee said of some of her colleagues. “In a pandemic, you also have to look at what is happening at the grassroots level. The general practitioners who treat the sick every day must be asked what they are experiencing, how the clinical picture presents itself.” The medic added she believes governments have “overreacted”.
The doctor, who works in Pretoria, is the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association (Sama). At the end of November she was the first to go to the new omicron variant of the coronavirus drew attention.
Coetzee’s statements triggered cautious hope
The World Health Organization (WHO) classified the variant as “concerning”. A few days after she had informed about the new variant, Coetzee said in an interview with the AFP news agency that she had observed milder symptoms in patients infected with the omicron variant than in patients with the delta variant that had previously prevailed. At the time, she criticized the fact that Omicron had been exaggerated as an “extremely dangerous virus variant” with numerous mutations, although its dangerousness was still unclear.
The SPD member of the Bundestag and today’s German Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach was cautiously optimistic in view of Coetzee’s statements. “It would really be an early Christmas present if Omicron went easier,” he wrote on Twitter. “But with so many mutations, it would be conceivable.”
Caution is also required with “mild gradients”.
The Omicron variant generally ensures weaker gradients than previous variants. Nevertheless, the so-called “mild courses” should also be taken seriously. While a large part of the population assumes that no noticeable health problems will occur if the course is mild, in medicine the term simply means that the patients do not need acute life-sustaining measures. Damaged organs and thrombosis in the legs can also be the result of a mild to moderate corona infection.