New data which suggested that Omicron may be less likely to lead to serious illness than the Delta variant offers a "glimmer of Christmas hope", a UK senior health official has said.
UK Health Security Agency chief executive Dr Jenny Harries warned that it was too early to downgrade the threat from the new variant, which is still spreading rapidly across the UK and Ireland. "There is a glimmer of Christmas hope in the findings that we published yesterday, but it definitely isn't yet at the point where we could downgrade that serious threat. "What we have got now is a really fine balance between something that looks like a lower risk of hospitalisation - which is great news - but equally a highly transmissible variant and one that we know