Dr. Jankovic's warning: Omicron dominates, half of Serbia will be on sick leave in January

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"Omicron absolutely dominates in Serbia, it's just that this has not yet been realistically comprehended through testing. We have five-digit numbers of new cases per day, and I don't know if there will be more than 20,000 or 30,000 officially, I'm not sure if we can detect that many. The worst will be the social explosion associated with Covid, because there will be hundreds of thousands of infected people who will be absent from work. Literally half of the population of Serbia will be on sick leave during January," says Professor Dr. Radmilo Jankovic, Deputy Director of the Clinical Center (UKC) Nis, the daily Kurir reported.

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According to the mandates that are now in effect, isolation lasts 14 days, while epidemiologists, according to Dr. Jankovic, should assess whether to shorten this to seven or even five days following the example of some western countries, because with Omicron the symptoms don't last as long. And the purpose of that would be to allow the state and society to function.

"There will officially certainly be fewer people infected than there really are because I'm not sure that we have the capacity to test everyone. We would have to do 100,000 tests a day to detect 30,000 infections. Unvaccinated people will be hit the hardest, because Covid will be like the common cold in vaccinated people. However, that does not mean that the weakest and most endangered may not develop severe forms of the disease," Dr. Jankovic said, adding that the number of infections in Nis increased tenfold within a week, which has been accelerated by New Year celebrations, so the figure went from 17 to almost 200.

Dr. Jankovic is still an "optimist" about one thing.

"I believe that we will not fill hospitals the way they were in the darkest days when we had 10,000 patients. The unvaccinated will end up in hospitals, but the pressure will certainly be lower with Omicron, unlike Delta, which caused much more severe forms of the disease. If we now have about 2,100 hospitalized patients, I believe that the maximum will be three or four times higher. The mortality rate will also decrease, as can be seen in other countries. Greece has 80 deaths per 38,000 new cases a day, while Portugal has 'only' 10-15 deaths per 30,000. But in the next two or three months, hundreds, maybe thousands of people will certainly die," said Dr. Jankovic.

He also stressed that vaccination cannot prevent the spread of Omicron, and that a strict lockdown would not help now.

"Omicron has gained so much momentum, it is spreading so fast that no strict measures would make sense. And no one could impose that on people, because Serbians entered the New Year thinking that coronavirus no longer exist," Dr. Jankovic pointed out.

As for whether flurona - a combination of flu and coronavirus, which has already been detected in Croatia - will further complicate things, Dr. Jankovic thinks that it probably will, but since he is not a virologist, he could not say exactly to what extent. But he was sure that there is no person in Serbia who does not have some symptoms of seasonal respiratory infections:

"Certainly, in addition to coronavirus, there is also the flu, and serious colds, colds, and there is certainly the possibility that mixing all that will create additional problems."

(Telegraf.rs)