Dr. Petrovic: By the end of March, 70% of people will be infected with Omicron and spread the virus

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The number of people actually infected with coronavirus is certainly three, maybe four times higher than that officially recorded based on laboratory analyses. This means that in the last seven days, since we have had five-digit numbers of confirmed new cases on a daily basis, between 250,000 and 300,000 people have been infected in Serbia, and the vast majority are "invisible in the records system."

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Making this assessment in a statement for Novosti, Dr. Radmilo Petrovic, an epidemiologist, added that by the end of March, 70 percent of the population will be infected with the Omicron strain, which has the most mutations so far and breaks through both post-vaccination and naturally acquired immunity.

"Of that number, we will detect only a minority, and the rest will walk around and spread the virus because they will have a completely asymptomatic infection," says Dr. Petrovic. "People infected with Omicron, in principle, have milder symptoms than those caused by the Delta variant of the virus, and I'm sure that most do not seek medical help at all. That is why I say that the number of infected is three or four times higher than what's registered. With a mass infection situation, and a lighter clinical picture that resembles having  cold, it is understandable to me that people choose not want to stand in line in front of Covid clinics (to get tested)."

Dr. Petrovic also said that the number of new cases will be constantly growing, most likely for another two weeks, before the curve flattens at the peak, and then, in the second half of February, it will start to descend.

"This wave is more explosive than the previous four, it started abruptly, a large part of the population will get infected faster, but it will last shorter than the others," says Dr. Petrovic.

"Nobody knows whether there will be another pandemic wave. This is a surprising virus, and whenever we think things will get better, they get worse. The fourth dose of the vaccine should definitely be administered, because antiviral vaccines we have at our disposal are not so potent as to create long-lasting immunity."

Virologist Milanko Sekler from the Veterinary Institute in Kraljevo, who was the first to present the forecast that Serbia could reach up to 30,000 new cases per day in this wave, says that because unvaccinated people produce a large amount of the virus, the vaccinated get infected as well.

"For those who received only two doses, the risk of infection is about 40 percent, while for those who received the third, booster dose of the vaccine, the risk is half that, below 20 percent, and their symptoms will be very mild, they will often be asymptomatic," said Sekler.

(Telegraf.rs)