Omicron accounts for 98% of confirmed COVID cases in Russia — official

MOSCOW. KAZINFORM - The majority of Russians who test positive for COVID these days have the Omicron variant, and the Russian Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare keeps monitoring the spread of viruses across the country, Anna Popova, the service’s head, said on Wednesday, TASS reports.

«If we go back to COVID, nearly 98% of all the variants we have seen in the past two weeks in Russia have been Omicron, or its subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. So far, those [variants] that we have been scared of, such as Cerberus and the rest, have not developed, as they are our isolated findings. But we are continuing and will continue to work in the coming future, and we definitely will not miss anything during the festive period,» she said in a televised interview with the Rossiya-24 channel.

Popova added that COVID has occupied its niche among seasonal infections.

«The new upswing was linked to a novel, very active, even very specific [viral] genomic variant, like Omicron or Delta. We are not seeing that now, so this slight increase has become more or less insignificant for our sensibilities,» she added.

Additionally, those coronavirus variants which are currently prevalent have become more contagious, but «tempered their ability to cause severe harm to the body.».