At the Commons science committee, Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association has accused the UK of a “knee-jerk response” in bringing in a travel ban within 24 hours of Omicron being announced in South Africa last month.
It would have been better to get people to wear masks, socially distance and keep away from large gatherings, she added.
While proof of vaccination or a negative lateral flow test for certain events could help reduce the spread of the virus, Dr Coetzee said lockdowns were too restrictive.
She said Omicron was at least as transmissible as the Delta variant. She said it generally produced a mild disease.
It was different for people in hospital, she said. Most people in hospital were unvaccinated, she said. She told the MPs that they did not do genomic sequencing for most patients, so the hospital statistics did not differentiate between Delta patients and Omicron patients. But she said intensive care units were “not overwhelmed” with Covid cases.
“What I think is important to do is to get people vaccinated, get people to wear their masks, and get people to stay away from big gatherings. That should be the biggest plan at this stage to have in place,” she told MPs.
Dr Coetzee said she agreed with data released in South Africa today that the severity of disease might be 29% lower than in the country’s previous wave. But she added that the numbers were uncertain and that in many cases, doctors did not know which variant patients were hospitalised with.
Further data from South Africa suggest that a double dose of Pfizer, without a booster, provides 33% protection against Omicron infection, down from 80% with Delta, and 70% protection against severe illness, down from 93% protection against Delta.
In the UK, most older people have received booster shots of Pfizer on top of their original two doses.
“They can still get breakthrough infections,” Dr Coetzee said, “however, the breakthrough infections that we are seeing in primary healthcare are mild.”