And there are a lot of Americans that haven't been vaccinated. It's about physical distance, ventilation, wearing masks in public and being vaccinated and to be vigilant and to continue to do surveillance in your country to make sure that you can pick up any variant that is emerging in your country. And we also emphasize a lot of ventilation and not to spend a lot of time indoors with many people. When you go out on the street, masking is mandatory. The second thing that we do very well in South Africa is that we mask in public. And so the first thing I would tell the American population is get vaccinated.
And we saw a large number of young people in our hospital because we don't have good coverage of vaccine in children over 12 and in young adults. We also showed that the people who were in hospital were more likely to be unvaccinated than vaccinated. And vaccines do protect against hospital admissions. GRAY: So we've seen that vaccines do work. What would you tell them, you know, as this country faces a flood of new cases and disruptions? PERALTA: I wonder if you could leave Americans with some advice. We wish and are hopeful that this may be the first move towards the SARS-CoV-2 becoming an endemic virus like the flu and hope omicron is the beginning of the evolution of the virus that enables us to coexist in a way that's not devastating to our health and to our economies. We have to keep on watching to see what emerges. GRAY: I think we can be cautiously optimistic. Gray, does this mild wave in South Africa tell us that, you know, we should start treating this or seeing this as the flu? Or is it too soon to think that? And another variant that comes along next time may be worse and more severe. And so although we are hopeful, we remain vigilant that this may just be a variant. Every time we've predicted something with SARS-CoV-2, we've been wrong. GRAY: So we're hoping that we're seeing the end - that the viruses will get milder and milder.
PERALTA: In South Africa, are you viewing this moment as a hopeful sign for future waves? We would have to see how people in other countries that have less preexisting immunity and less vaccination rates - to see how this virus fares there. And so we weren't sure whether there was a combination of preexisting immunity or whether the little bit of vaccination we had done was helping us control this surge much better than before.
So we have high levels of preexisting immunity, and we have a moderate vaccine coverage. GRAY: Well, I think we were, first of all, very careful to say that we weren't sure whether this was a less virulent virus or whether this hybrid immunity that we have in South Africa, where we have lots of people - up to 70 to 80% of people in our country had been exposed to either the delta or the beta or the original virus in our country. PERALTA: Do you have a good understanding as to why? So you could see that this virus was behaving in a much different way. We were excited when we saw that, in fact, people weren't going to hospital and that the cases were very mild in comparison to our experience with delta. And we look at our death registers, and we look at our cases. So we did a lot of surveillance in hospitals. I think when we first heard about the omicron variant, we watched very carefully. Now that we have some hindsight, was that the right thing to do? The government lifted a nighttime curfew that has been in place since I can remember. In fact, South Africa did just the opposite. But during this wave, there were no new lockdown measures. PERALTA: So from the beginning, South Africa has taken a very cautious approach to this pandemic. And we are happy that we've passed our peak of our fourth wave and that we also are seeing much less hospitalizations and a lot less deaths than we've seen in the past. And we've been monitoring and doing surveillance. GRAY: Yes, we've been watching this - the number of cases. Are you satisfied that this wave of the pandemic is now past its peak? PERALTA: So let's begin with the situation right now in South Africa. She is the president of the South African Medical Research Council. Now, as South Africa's omicron wave recedes, we wanted to know what the country has learned. They alerted the world, and they began collecting data. The omicron variant was first detected by scientists in Botswana in South Africa.
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