South Africa is still seeing a rapid increase in cases, but this weekend's numbers (Sunday and Monday) might hint at a slowdown, they're more off-trend than the usual weekend reporting slowdown. Tomorrow should give us a clear signal.
The 7 day average is still sharply up.
I've seen many people who really ought to know better looking at hospitalization data and drawing conclusions. Hospital admissions usually lag cases by about a week, so we're just now about to see admissions from November 28 or so...when cases numbers were starting to get large.
There's also the issue that the start of this wave skewed very young. That both reduces apparent severity through fewer hospital admissions, and increase the percentage of children being admitted. Both of these have been the source of headlines that aren't taking the case age distribution into account.
We don't know yet whether Omicron is more or less severe. We don't know yet whether it is more or less dangerous for children. Watch this coming week's hospital admissions for our first real clues.
Note in this chart that the Case Fatality Rate since Delta is running about twice as high as it was pre Delta for most age groups. (This is a log scale, each horizontal line is a 10x increase.)
This is happening with improved treatment and disproportionate vaccine uptake in the most vulnerable populations, Delta's native severity is probably even worse.
I expect to see rising cases through the holidays, then whatever trendline Delta is following will be bent sharply upward as Omicron takes off.
It's too early to tell, but I expect the Delta winter/holiday wave to have us in a fairly bad situation, and Omicron to make it much, much worse in terms of impact on the health care system.
Some doctors have anecdotal reports that their mostly young patients haven't had severe symptoms. But that's true for pretty much all variants of COVID.
It's still too early to get a quantitative read on hospitalizations, because the earliest part of the Omicron wave is just now reaching the time frame where hospitalizations could happen. And since the outbreak started in a young crowd, we'll have to wait for age-segmented hospitalization numbers to have any read.
We'll get hints this week, decent numbers a week or two from now. For all we know, Omicron could be the same severity as delta, or 5x stronger, or 5x weaker. We just don't know.
I really hope I'm wrong.
