> South Africa delivered some positive news on the omicron coronavirus variant on Friday, reporting a much lower rate of hospital admissions ... Only 1.7% of identified Covid-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of infections in the fourth wave, compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave ... Health officials presented evidence that the strain may be milder, and that infections may already be peaking in the country’s most populous province, Gauteng.
It is too early to be confident about what is happening from the sidelines. The evidence is a bit murky and we might be about to see some horrible numbers in the aggregate numbers. Or we might not.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/18/no-evidence-omicro...
> Cited Study: The non peer-reviewed research was based on UK Health Security Agency and National Health Service data on people who tested positive for COVID-19 in a PCR test in England between November 29 and December 11
Well, of course there won't be evidence in that dataset! This was before even a single omicron death in the UK.
However there is evidence in other datasets - including what is happening on the ground in South Africa.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-ra...
<jk> Obviously you can't determine anything without taking into account the estimated/guessed factors (extent of people movement, other restrictions) included in the models versus what really happened (new restrictions, lower than expected movement). And why only select this subset of forecasts, given they are produced daily/weekly (depending on urgency)? There was an early prediction that Covid would only cause ~30,000 deaths in the UK, why wasn't that included?
Do you have a link to anything that isn't Fox-news level cherry-picking? The Spectator is notoriously not a reliable source.
If the model promises hell, the country goes into full lockdown and at the end we only see a mild hell-ish, was the model wrong?
Full lockdown is just a major inconvince.
Restrictions focused at me, a healthy vaccinated under-30 yo male aren’t helping anyone.
It's a second order concept but it's not hard to understand for anyone reading HN.
If you knock down the dominos, they will mostly all get knocked down and take everyone with them.
If you separate the dominos, they don't take everything down.
I'm not sure if lockdowns are the right measure, and public fatigue is a factor - but if they end up being a rational measure then that's what we need to do.
There is no clear evidence as of yet to suggest hospitalization or mortality rates of Omicron among our kind of population.
We'll have a better idea in a few weeks.
It's clear from SA that this wave is having lower mortality than previous waves (perhaps for a mixture of reasons).
There is also data that shows that Omicron spreads much slower in the lung than the previous variant, while spreading 70 times faster in bronchial tissue (which is why it is so transmissable) so there is a suspected vector for why it may be milder. (https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/omicron-propagate...)
Nothing we've seen yet is definitive.