The symptoms of Omicron are “different” from previous strains of coronavirus, an Oxford professor has said.
Sir John Bell urged people to look out for a sore throat, aching muscles particularly around the back, a stuffy nose, some stomach upset and loose stools as signs of having Omicron.
“One of the things we do know is the syndrome is rather different,” he said.
Sir Bell, a Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, said myalgia, which is muscle pain, was a “distinguishing feature” of Omicron and that public health experts did not know why that was.
He said data from South Africa and the Zoe App showed that other unusual symptoms of Omicron include a “bit of gut upset, loose stools and that sort of thing”.
“It’s one of the most interesting features of this. It looks like it’s behaving differently,” he told BBC 4’s Today programme.
Sir Bell added that while some things were known about Omicron, others are yet to be determined by data.
He said: “We know some things about this variant and there are a lot of things we don’t know”.
“We know this is a highly infectious variant, two or three times as infectious as Delta, which was a pretty infectious variant of its own.”
He added: “One of the reasons it’s sweeping through the country so quickly is because it is very, very infectious”.
However, when it comes to the severity of the illness, Sir John said “at the moment, we don’t really have the data” and said the next few weeks will show how severe the variant is in the UK.
He said the current Plan B restrictions imposed by the Government are “probably the right balance of trying to slow the spread” of the virus.
He also hailed the booster programme as “the most important thing” to tackle Omicron, and said that while working from home was “fine”, self-isolation was a “very inefficient way of stopping a pandemic” and Covid passes “become a political issue”.
Calling for everyone to get a jab, he said: “The best thing we can do is to get people who haven’t been vaccinated, vaccinated.
“That’s the thing that really grinds the system down.”
