MrFoolish wrote:But didn't South Africa previously have very low numbers of hospitalisations? If you go from 1 person to 20 persons you get a multiplier of 20x (and 0 persons to 1 person is a multiplier of infinity). Now obviously these numbers aren't real, but you get the idea. You can't take a multiplier effect from omicron and apply it to the numbers in hospital from delta.
Obviously each country has run its own course, but overall SA has had ~85% of the per capita hospitalisations of the UK across the pandemic, so they're not one of these countries that's escaped lightly. My point was less about the specific numbers and more about the rise. If you'd rather deal in absolute numbers, SA has seen hospitalisations so far increase by the UK-per-capita-equivalent of 1200 per day, which on top of our existing delta infections would represent a trebling from where we were a few weeks ago. Given that hospitalisations are still rising in SA, once can imagine that the UK could end up peaking at around 2500-3000 per day, or 4x the autumn low (which was still a time of considerable stress on the NHS). Which feels appropriately near the "optimistic" end of the LSHTM modelling.
It's not as bad as it could be, but it's still not to be dismissed as "a modest uptick". Obviously the data in SA is limited and provisional, but if you combine their "BUPA" saying
cases in this wave are hospitalised at 71% of the rate of their previous wave (adjusted for age and jabs but not infection nor variant) with
their health minister saying their case fatality rate was a third of the previous wave, with hospital stays about half as long, whilst their dashboard was saying about 8% of the hospital population was in ICU and a similar number in "high care".
Holy crap, there's been a huge leap just in the last day or two since I last looked,
the dashboard is saying their Covid hospital population is now 9.02k when it was 2-3k for most of last week, which is rather more than the new admission rate implying they're staying longer. There was some suspicion out there that there was something up with the SA stay data, maybe that's been resolved. So the new data is saying 6.7% of the population in ICU, compared to the UK's ~12% on ventilation (down a bit recently from 14% or so over the autumn).
So if you say the UK has been on around 35k cases/day since August, around 2.5% of those have been admitted to hospital, the hospital population has been 8x the daily admission rate (ie average stay 8 days) and 14% have been on ventilation.
If you use the South African numbers, then the UK will go to 1.775% of cases going to hospital, hospital population will be 4x the daily admission rate, and 7% will be on ventilation. So for a given case rate, we'll have 35.5% of the hospital population compared to the autumn, and 17.75% of the numbers on ventilation.
But the
latest finalised case rate is 102k last Wednesday. If that was all omicron and the SA stats apply, it would mean roughly the same hospital population and half the ventilation is already "baked in" for later this week - and some of it is delta, so it's worse.
Now the UK is a bit different - much older population, but more jabs/boosters - and omicron so far has been concentrated in the 20-somethings who don't get as sick. But in time it will spread to the older generations.
Last year the peak cases were four days after Christmas and four days after NYE. If cases were to double every 4 days (rather than the current 2-3 days), it's 14 days from the 15th to Christmas+4 so potentially the cases on the 29th could be 11x 100k - which means a week or two later 11x the current hospital population and 5x the ventilation.
A "modest uptick" indeed.
MrFoolish wrote:Hallucigenia wrote:
And one of the real problems is
it spreads massively within hospitals :
Word from the front line trenches: omicron spreads like wildfire. Omicron went from one patient in a ward, to 8 pts and 4 staff infected overnight to 5 wards full (mostly hospital acquired)4 days later. Monday was horrible Tuesday worse....Omicron kills in the same way as 'classic covid' in the elderly - exponential oxygen or a more gentle oxygen demand and then death. Lots of back pain and diarrhoea as a feature as well as sore throat. Most of the old who are dying are double vaxed with AZ
I'm skeptical about these anecdotes which are clearly written in such a way as to cause maximum alarm. It's interesting to note what wasn't said in that paragraph, such as the numbers that died. Seems an odd omission.
Typically it takes 28 days to die from Covid, and omicron has been in the UK just over 3 weeks - only an idiot would be looking at death rates right now.
Aside from the fact that as above, it's mostly in 20-somethings at the moment who are less likely to die. And are you equally as sceptical of media who have tried to minimise the severity of omicron? Frankly if I was a doctor on the frontline, I would be feeling pretty alarmist about seeing a spread from one patient to 5 wards in a matter of days - wouldn't you? And it ties in with what we know of previous variants being very "super-spready" and some of the data that suggests 20-25% of all omicron infections are caught in hospital, so I don't think it's implausible.
MrFoolish wrote:
Regarding the needs for oxygen, what has happened with our own Nightingale hospitals? I haven't heard any mention of them on the news. You'd think they'd be on active standby with staff and the army being trained to administer oxygen, no?
Because Nightingale hospitals were an embarassing failure last time, because ministers thought that if you build them, the staff will appear out of nowhere and they didn't, they were all needed in the normal hospitals. There's actually an argument that omicron is better suited to a Nightingale approach, given its transmissibility and apparently somewhat lower severity, but politically that's probably impossible now.