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Comment by peteradio | Hacker News Reader

When 100% of the population was dry tinder hospitals were under strain X.

Now we have 1/10th that by your estimate. Why wouldn't we be under significantly less strain?

Current variants are significantly more infectious (R0 used to be around 2.5-3.0 for the ancestral strain, Delta was 5+, Omicron estimates go up to 10). Vaccine efficacy is also reduced for these variants. We've also scaled back non-pharmaceutical interventions in many places.

You've neglected to account for the substantial difference in average hospital stay period between Delta and Omicron.

Do we know how large this effect is for the unvaccinated? I'm still not sure if the numbers we're seeing from countries with relatively high seroprevalence through either vaccination, infection, or both can easily be applied to other countries.

This UK report[1] does show a corrected Hazard Ratio of 0.76 relative to Delta, but more than half of this group seems to have had a previous infection. Not sure what it would look like if you exclude them.

[1]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...

Because it has never taken more than a small fraction of the immune-naive population getting coronavirus to have the severe cases overload the hospitals and Delta made that worse.

And Omicron is able to reinfect through the recovered/vaccinated population and we're not taking any precautions at all now so the rate of infections is through the roof.

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