Covid 'could have been five times as bad if Omicron was first strain'

Prof John Bell says that whether the virus emerged from a lab or naturally, the world must be ready for the next pandemic

A patient taken by ambulance to Royal London Hospital in East London. Getty Images

If Omicron had been the first Covid strain to emerge in Wuhan in 2020, there could have been significantly more deaths worldwide, an eminent immunologist has said.

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said the impact of the pandemic “could have been a lot worse” with the highly infectious variant.

He was speaking after comments by former Chinese government scientist Prof George Gao, who said the possibility the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory should not be ruled out.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir John said he did not think the evidence of whether it emerged from a lab, or naturally, was conclusive either way.

“I would put it to you that it actually doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “We know historically that we do get pathogens that come from the animal kingdom that get into man that cause these sorts of outbreaks.

“And we also know that labs that look after these very pathogenic viruses do leak.”

How the world responds to be ready for another pandemic is most important, he said.

Sir John said he had recently held a meeting attended by Prof Gao, at which Covid modelling by a company called Airfinity was discussed.

“They did the modelling around the idea that if the first virus that appeared in Wuhan had not been the Wuhan strain, but had been the Omicron strain, which we all know is much, much more infectious,” he said. “And that had hit an immunologically naive population, in other words a population that had never seen the virus before.

“The peak mortality in the UK would have been about five times what it was with the originally Wuhan strain. Remember those were pretty dark times during April and May of 2020 and I don’t think we would have wanted five times the number of people dying.

“And had it been Avian flu it would have been 15 times [higher]. So I think when we hear that there is a great pandemic coming, if either one of those things were to happen, it would be a great deal worse than what we saw.”

In an interview with the BBC, Prof Gao told Radio 4 podcast Fever: The Hunt for Covid's Origin: “You can always suspect anything. That's science. Don't rule out anything.”

Prof Gao is now vice president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China after retiring last year from the CDC, where he played a key role in the pandemic response and efforts to trace how it started.

The theory that Covid leaked accidentally from a Chinese lab resurfaced in February when the FBI's director Christopher Wray said this was where the virus had “most likely” originated, although there is no consensus among US intelligence agencies on the matter.