Omicron variant is not THAT mild
This graph of South African hospital patients should make you pause before you say that “Omicron is not severe”. COVID-19 patients receiving oxygen jumped 68% in 2 weeks, which is huge!
I know you want to know more about other factors that may influence this chart. Yes there have been more new admissions. Maybe all the new admissions are just all the people with a broken bone needing to get a cast. They just so happen to be Omicron positive and have such a weak infection they don’t notice it. So you’d expect a proportional increase in oxygen requirements, right? There has been a spike in new admissions:
Currently admitted patients (that is patients in a bed right now) have been going down over time, with a new kick up from the current wave, but not a kick up of 68%. Note that many patients are discharged much earlier than a full week, which is why this graph is lower than “new” admissions above:
The important thing to note is that the proportion of patients who require oxygen has jumped from 8.8% to 14.5%. If Omicron was way milder than Delta, we’d expect a huge number of cases, with the proportion of cases needing oxygen to go down. Instead, the opposite has happened.
You’ll note that ventilated has not changed that much. This is expected at this point. The spike in oxygen requirements comes first, which is followed by ventilation as the disease worsen.
What does that mean for us? With around 100,000 Omicron cases to date in south Africa if you consider all of the recent (since 23rd Nov) COVID-19 cases as Omicron, and probably many more in the community, the risk risk of 200 people out of 100,000 needing oxygen isn’t that bad.
However, I need to point out that it takes time for infections to develop into disease. It may take 1 week to feel badly sick, and 2 weeks to need oxygen, and 3 weeks to be intubated and/or die. So many of the recent cases have not had a lot of time to develop.
The big issue is that even if Omicron is mild compared to Delta, it is likely that 1% of people, or maybe more, will need oxygen at some point. And if Omicron spreads far quicker than any other version, a large chunk of our society (say 30%) may end up infected and needing oxygen AT THE SAME TIME.
Without oxygen intervention, the outcome for many patients may go from a short stint on oxygen, straight up to cardiac arrest in a hospital car park because your heart fails to compensate for the low oxygen.
What about vaccines? Well it seems vaccines aren’t providing great protection against infection. It seems that a Christmas party in Norway attended by around 120 people looks likely to result in 60 Omicron infections. This does not bode well for the efficacy of vaccines in preventing infections. In my own city, Sydney Australia, confirmed Omicron cases have increased from 15 to 30 in a couple of days. It’s still very early days though.
We are yet to see what happens in a heavily vaccinated population, because South Africa is not well vaccinated (although they had around 50% of its population with antibodies as a result of infection in the past 2 years). And we don’t really know the end game of infections even in South Africa, let alone highly vaccinated countries, as it has only been a couple of weeks since discovery.
Conclusion: you are unlikely to die from Omicron, but you were also unlikely to die from Delta. You should be careful either way, reduce your risk of catching it, and passing it on to others. And don’t say that it is mild. Signs point to it still being a virus that we should treat with caution.
Data source: South Africa NICD DATCOV
Data table for those interested:
