Rapid increase in Omicron infections in England during December 2021: REACT-1 study
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Abstract
The unprecedented rise in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections during December 2021 was concurrent with rapid spread of the Omicron variant in England and globally. We analyzed the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 and its dynamics in England from the end of November to mid-December 2021 among almost 100,000 participants in the REACT-1 study. Prevalence was high with rapid growth nationally and particularly in London during December 2021, with an increasing proportion of infections due to Omicron. We observed large decreases in swab positivity among mostly vaccinated older children (12 to 17 years) relative to unvaccinated younger children (5 to 11 years), and in adults who received a third (booster) vaccine dose versus two doses. Our results reinforce the importance of vaccination and booster campaigns, although additional measures have been needed to control the rapid growth of the Omicron variant.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.22.21268252: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It has been suggested that Omicron may be associated with less severe disease than Delta with the caveat of differential population immunity from vaccination and previous infection [19]. However, the small number of Omicron infections observed in REACT-1 to date were among young to middle-aged adults where case fatality ratios will be lower than among the older population. Omicron may have greater escape from immunity conferred by …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.22.21268252: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It has been suggested that Omicron may be associated with less severe disease than Delta with the caveat of differential population immunity from vaccination and previous infection [19]. However, the small number of Omicron infections observed in REACT-1 to date were among young to middle-aged adults where case fatality ratios will be lower than among the older population. Omicron may have greater escape from immunity conferred by vaccination than Delta, with an estimated 20 to 40 times higher antibody titre required for neutralisation [20]. In vitro studies show clear evidence that individuals receiving a third (booster) dose of mRNA vaccine following two previous vaccine doses have greatly increased neutralisation of the Omicron variant [7,21]. Although in our study, none of the confirmed Omicron infections were observed in individuals following booster immunisation (all had received two vaccine doses), the number of Omicron positive samples available at the time of publication is too small to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of boosters against Omicron infections. While we estimated there were on average 31,000 infections in England from Omicron during 1-11 December, the rapid doubling time suggests that without further measures this figure could reach into the hundreds of thousands by late December 2021. The most recent estimates from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) indicate that there were 60,508 confirmed Omicron cases in England, and 143,252 cumulative ca...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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