Russia (bbabo.net), - Compared to influenza, the Omicron strain of coronavirus is eight times more contagious. So, if a patient with the flu can infect two people, then a patient diagnosed with "omicron" can infect from 13 to 16 people. This opinion was expressed by the director of the US Center for Global Virological Network, Professor Konstantin Chumakov.

Omicron is more contagious than the flu. This is judged by the so-called reproductive number. This means if you have one sick person, how many people can he infect. If the number is equal to one, then it will infect exactly one person. For measles, this factor is 13 - 16. And for "omicron" this is about the same. And for the flu, it is somewhere from one and a half to two," Chumakov said on the air of Radio Russia.

British scientists have previously warned that a future variant of COVID-19 could very well be more dangerous and lead to far more deaths and cases of serious illness than Omicron. This theory is based on the fact that the omicron variant did not come from the delta variant, but from a completely different part of the virus family tree. Experts note that it is not known where a new variant will appear in the family tree of the virus, therefore it is not known how pathogenic it can be - both in one direction and the other.

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