Professor Mary-Louise McLaws is a World Health Organisation Covid Response Advisor and frequent guest on the show. On Wednesday, Project panellist Rachel Corbett asked McLaws to name the strangest thing she’d discovered about Omicron in her research.McLaws explained one early theory about the variant that, if proven correct, would explain why it appears to be so much more transmissable than earlier versions of the virus. “One of the things I find quite remarkable is the theory that Omicron has the ability to ‘charge’ the spike; to have positive and negative charges. If this is the case, then as we’re expelling it while we’re talking, laughing and singing, it can hook on to mucus, polysaccharides, and remain charged in the air with these other particles. Potentially, we’re more at risk of airborne spread, and that will be problematic. That’s why I’m saying to people, please socialise outside, in case this is true,” she said. “Thanks for scaring the hell out of me, Mary-Louise,” Macdonald quipped.Elsewhere in the interview, McLaws said she wasn’t of the opinion that Christmas needed to be “cancelled” due to the exploding cases of omicron, but she advised the public to celebrate “safely.”“Make sure you’ve had your booster shot, wear your mask when shopping for Christmas presents, and try to socialise outside as much as possible,” she advised. She also warned that the relatively low number of hospitalisations from omicron will rise, with hospitalisation rates generally on a two-week lag from case rates: “We will see it the more cases we get, it’s just pure maths. The UK and Norway and Denmark will be able to teach us a lot about whether we’ll see more people going into hospital.”Panellist Liz Ellis asked McLaws about one disturbing prediction from Health Minister Brad Hazzard, who said yesterday that epidemiologists are anticipating New South Wales will record up to 25,000 cases of coronavirus a day by the end of January.“That’s a huge amount, and we have certain controls to help us reduce the morbidity and mortality,” said McLaws. “Just because you haven’t been hospitalised, doesn’t mean you don’t feel as if you’ve been hit by a bus. But certainly if we’re going to get 25,000 cases a day, the proportion of cases going into hospital will eventually overwhelm us, and then we’ll start seeing more deaths because people won’t be able to get to hospital.”McLaws isn’t the only Covid expert to deliver some worrying warnings about the omicron variant on The Project recently. Last week, a top US epidemiologist described the notion that it’s a milder version of the disease as a “sweet little lie”. NSW has today recorded 1742 new Covid cases, up from 1360 the day before. Victoria recorded 1622 new cases today, the highest number since October 11.
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