Too early to measure Omicron's impact on S.Africa COVID-19 mortality - officials

It is too early to tell how many COVID-19 deaths in South Africa are driven by the new Omicron variant, health officials said on Monday.

"We collect information on all the COVID-19 admissions. However, we don't do genomic typing on every patient diagnosed so we don't know whether they have Delta variant or Omicron variant," Waasila Jassat of South Africa's National Institute of Communicable Diseases told reporters.

 

(Reporting by Wendell Roelf and Alexander Winning Editing by Gareth Jones)