How/when would you know if you had omicron?

[Bee4229]

Dp is covid positive. Tested on sunday, positive result on Monday. We'd know by know and be told if it was omicron right?! I've read conflicting things about it.

I wondered the same, my daughter had a PCR on Sunday with the positive result arriving on Monday. I haven't heard anything else apart from track and trace so I assume it's not Omicron.

They aren't testing all positives for Omicron though are they?

They are screening for Omicron so you’d be told. Delta is still by far the most dominant strain still. & if you do and you aren’t told, , not your fault. You can only deal with the information you have!

My understanding is that the S gene is missing in Omicron which can be picked up quite easily from a PCR. If it is missing, then it’s sent off for further testing to confirm.

Took 5 days for them to tell me, then had to do another PCr that they sent me to be sure.

Thanks all 💕

No they are not screening all positive tests for omicron. It’s just a small percentage they are selecting so it’s pure luck if you find out you have it or not.

That was what a friend was told by public health recently when their test was one of the small percentage selected for omicron screening. No one else in the same household was selected despite all being covid positive.

Some labs can see if there is an s antigen drop out (which is exactly how alpha was found), so if there is s antigen dropout it would be likely to be omicron (there is no alpha around, or only a miniscule amount). This distinguishes it from Delta and so at the moment they will be sequencing those samples. Within a short while they will all be omicron I imagine so there won't be much point in distinguishing. I believe at the moment you are told if it's suspected omicron, but remember it's not that high a percentage at the moment.

I think I read this week only a third to half of all labs in UK can test for it at the moment. And it takes a while too. Hopefully they can speed things up and get more labs testing more positive cases, but expect case numbers will then be far higher than now

What @Nikita1709 said. There’s an S gene mutation in Omicron which means that one of the 3 genes detected in the usual PCR test is not detected in Omicron. So if there’s an S gene dropout in your test it’s likely to be Omicron. However this is not unique to Omicron so it needs to be confirmed by sequencing to be sure. At the moment Omicron is spreading quickly, so chances are if it’s an S gene dropout it’s Omicron.

They are only testing a small percentage for Omicron, maybe 10%

If they're vaccinated apparently it can be milder.