Both of the concerns have been addressed by Hay et al., at least for healthy young men. They additionally sequenced the samples to differentiate between Omicron, Delta, and other variants. noted 97 Omicron infections and 107 Delta infections. In other words, Delta infections elicit more virus particles in a host than Omicron infections, but only moderately. As such, Omicron has a slightly shorter clearance phase, 5.35 days as compared to 6.23 days for Delta, as Omicron has a lower peak viral load.

Source: Forbes January 19, 2022 16:44 UTC