This is informative; an excerpt:
The more complicated thing is that we don’t yet know what it’s going to do in very highly vaccinated populations. We know of a case from Israel in which a person who had received three shots transmitted to another person who had received three shots. I don’t want to overstate that single data point, but the fact that we have noted that happening already is important in terms of the ability of three shots to control transmission. Three shots can still be highly protective, though. I would fall off my chair if it turned out that the vaccines’ efficacy against serious illness was seriously affected....
About all we can exclude are the extremes. We know that it’s not very mild because hospitalizations are ticking up in South Africa. We know that it’s not incredibly serious, because hospitalizations are ticking up but not incredibly fast. So, all we can exclude is the extremes, and there’s a lot of room between those extremes for the virus to spring a nasty surprise upon us.
UPDATE: More on the case of the Israeli doctors from the NYT, and this is good news (the one person it appears the doctor infected was someone he shared a 90-minute car ride with):
Elad Maor initially feared that he might have exposed hundreds of people to the virus when he became the first Israeli to test positive for the new Omicron variant on Saturday morning.
In the three days before his positive results, Dr. Maor, a cardiologist, had attended a large staff meeting at his hospital east of Tel Aviv. He had inserted stents into the arteries of 10 patients. And he had driven to a cardiology conference north of Tel Aviv, sharing the 90-minute car journey with a 70-year-old colleague, and lunched there with five others in a crowded canteen.
Dr. Maor, 45, had attended a piano recital with dozens in the audience, where his 13-year-old played a short piece by Stephen Heller, a Hungarian composer. And finally, last Friday night, Dr. Maor had eaten sea bass at the home of his in-laws, together with his wife and nine other family members.
That number may yet rise, as the virus can take several days to show up in tests, and not every contact has been tested. But at least 50 people have already been screened with a P.C.R. test by Dr. Maor’s hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, and at least 10 of those have been tested at least three times.
These initial results have led the infectious disease experts at Sheba, which houses one of Israel’s leading coronavirus laboratories, to cautiously hope that people who have been vaccinated three times may not be as vulnerable to Omicron as was first feared.
But of these many people, most of whom had received three shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, only his 70-year-old colleague has so far tested positive for the Omicron variant in the five days since.
On the other hand, Dr. Maor reports the virus knocked him out and left him in bed for 48 hours.
