Okay as an experiment here it is. Discuss your favourite generals here!
Well perhaps… Really this is simply the place to post news-items, fun-items or whatever takes your fancy. In short just post what you want here.
It’s just another wee experiment – comments welcome.
Squonk.
[Image: General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry)]
https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/more-children-admitted-with-covid-19-symptoms-to-hospitals/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bIOgcoFMck&t=359s
Hospital Admissions continue more than doubling every week in Gauteng and deaths last week were more than double the week before for the first time in their 4th wave. If the deaths chart is following the admissions chart with a roughly 2 week delay then big trouble ahead so let’s hope it isn’t.
Gauteng Admissions
Gauteng Deaths
Note the data gets backfilled and it is likely that both reported admissions and deaths for week 48 will still increase.
Source: https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covid-19/surveillance-reports/daily-hospital-surveillance-datcov-report/
So if anybody tells you “There have been no reported deaths from Omicron” ask them why the covid deaths in Gauteng more than doubled last week from the week before.
Just a very mild doubling to over 2000 excess deaths in South Africa in one week.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/s-african-weekly-excess-deaths-almost-double-amid-omicron-wave
I think the Bloomberg story has the dates wrong and the latest week excess deaths are for the week beginning Sunday Nov 28 not ending November 28 as the actual report says data through to week 48 ending Saturday 4th December. Doubling then fits exactly with the approximate doubling (55 to 102) in national hospital deaths over the same week 47 to 48. Of course we need more than one week to see if this is the start of a concerning trend or noisy data (or both). But there looks to be at least some signal there to me.
Actual report at https://www.samrc.ac.za/sites/default/files/files/2021-12-08/weekly4Dec2021.pdf
Google translated
https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/kleve/omikron-im-kreis-kleve-bestaetigt-covid-nach-suedafrika-reise_aid-64520525
And official statement confirming two children seriously ill at https://www.kreis-kleve.de/de/aktuelles/vollstaendiges-laborergebnis-bestaetigt-eindeutig-zwei-omikron-indexfaelle-im-kreis-kleve/
Long thread here worth reading the whole thing. Bottom line is nothing in the South Africa data so far suggests Omicron is intrinsically “milder” than other variants but read the entire thread.
Look we all want it to be milder. I’d certainly love it to be milder but there don’t seem to be any features of the genetic code of the Omicron variant that would suggest it could be milder as far as the experts can see. Now they could be missing something of course and I’ve not seen anything definitive as to whether part of the spike is still seen as super-antigenic and I’m not sure there was much consensus on how much of a role that played anyway.
Still I’m going to continue to hope for good news on any front because with 34% of London samples Omicron on 8th December (that’s likely over 50% today) London and overall UK covid case counts are heading into orbit soon.
Two weeks ago I wrote
A week later I wondered if the hospital deaths were following admissions with a 2 week delay. So how do deaths compare after that two week delay?
Yep, just a very mild five times increase in hospital deaths over the last two weeks. And that’s based on still partial data for week 49 (Their Week 50 started yesterday). Deaths for week 49 still likely to increase considerably as data is back-filled.
These figures are just for Gauteng Province and yet everyone seems to think nobody has died of omicron in South Africa.
Source: https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covid-19/surveillance-reports/daily-hospital-surveillance-datcov-report/
So we must all be happy and rejoice that across South Africa only a few hundred people so far are mildly dead from Omicron on official figures. Based on previous waves many hundreds more will have died even more mildly (without even troubling a hospital!) unofficially of omicron.
And jolly good show for the thousands more who will also mildly die in South Africa (and of course more elsewhere) in the coming weeks in support of the dream of herd immunity.
And hospital admission in London now leading the way up
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-rapid-spread-omicron-england/
Full report https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-49-omicron/
As we seem to be locked into one massive surge of Omicron I’m trying my best to cling on to anything that might reduce the final death toll. I like this pre-print and just hope it doesn’t turn out to be another false hope.
https://www.citiid.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FIGURES-OMICRON-PAPER.pdf
However nobody seems to have a good answer yet as to why Omicron has such a high observed transmissibility compared to all other variants if it has “compromised” its replication ability and is not good at infecting some cells unless it has much, much better ability to enter other cells (and how does that fit in with “compromised” replication). Another study found much better ability to enter bronchial cells than previous variants but it seems there’s still too much unknown.
Meanwhile in South Africa deaths continue to pile up, just not at the truly horrendous rates they reached previously. Based on the daily hospital data about 500 people a week are dying at the moment as backdated deaths fill in – Just 4 weeks ago there were only 55 recorded covid deaths in one week. So Delta was only managing to kill about 50 people a week then along came “mild” Omicron and increased that ten fold in a month.
And remember almost everyone catching covid in South Africa has already caught it before. Most of their most vulnerable age groups are vaccinated and a high proportion are both previously infected AND vaccinated which is thought to give very good protection against serious illness.
I want to believe South African deaths are lower because of some intrinsic property of this variant but there are also very seemingly convincing arguments that most or all of the decreased severity in South Africa is due to prior infection and vaccination compared to earlier waves. We now know that plenty of people are getting sick in the UK from Omicron and seemingly many are ending up in hospital. Possible even worse many seem to be catching it in hospital (both staff and patients) and critical services in London already with escalating staff shortages…
I can only hope it is spectacularly less lethal in the UK than Delta currently, or news really will be grim by Christmas.
Oh dear. The paper I quoted last comment well things may not be as they seemed and perhaps Omicron really did grow just as well.
UK wholesale Natural Gas Price
Oh Just great
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1
Covid obviously affecting the brain as Scotland loses ability to do basic arithmetic
https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-daily-data-for-scotland/
I remember when 13% of 52,022 used to be 6,763
This is very interesting. While I’d expected the measures in England would have reduced R I didn’t think that would be below 1.
Don’t want to get my hopes up just yet but it is certainly interesting. Let’s hope it isn’t a testing limit or backlog
Oh well that hope didn’t last long as back up again today.
If behaviour changes have brought R substantially below 1 for Delta but still left Omicron above 1 perhaps a fast drop off in Delta masked the slower, but still ongoing march of Delta, with some testing capacity issues as well?
And London hospital admissions that Boris is supposedly watching
London Covid Daily Hospital Admissions
Preliminary analysis from Edinburgh University suggests you are 2/3 less likely to be admitted to hospital with Omicron. There are so many caveats in the report and based on such small numbers that it could be completely misleading but I want to believe it. However if they are correct that would seem to imply that today’s London hospital admissions would have been closer to 900 (if same as Delta) than the 300 announced and no model was predicting anything like that just yet based on case lag.
Report at https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/severity-of-omicron-variant-of-concern-and-vaccine-effectiveness-
Anyway latest UK Omicron hospital report. In England so far 195 hospitalizations and 18 deaths so far – and that’s backdated. There have been almost 1000 covid admissions to London hospitals in 4 days to 20th December and the ever increasing majority of these will be Omicron. UK daily Omicron report at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-omicron-daily-overview
And Imperial looking at England data suggest a 15-20% reduced chance of hospitalisation compared to current Delta wave and 40-45% reduction in hospital stays over 1 day. Given that a lot of current infections are re-infections that Delta couldn’t re-infect but does reduce severity they calculate that the the actual reduction between risk of hospitalisation for someone not previously infected and not vaccinated is between 0 and 30%.
So if that Imperial report is correct if you are not vaccinated and not yet infected, Omicron is at least almost as likely to send you to hospital as Delta with the added bonus it is far more likely to infect you soon. Not enough data yet to say anything about death rates.
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232882/some-reduction-hospitalisation-omicron-delta-england/
Last day of London hospital admissions before Christmas
As the news continues to bombard us with how mild Omicron is I find the common belief “but only 1 person has died WITH it in the UK not FROM it”
Out of the first 668 identified Omicron hospital patients in England, 49 of them are already mildly dead.
Meanwhile in the sewers…
Wastewater COVID-19 Tracking
Massachusetts Water Resources Authority
Source: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
RIP Trowbridge H Ford
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nhregister/name/trowbridge-ford-obituary?id=30482371
Worth reading the entire quoted thread
Meanwhile hospital covid deaths in South Africa continue to mildly pile up
Total excess deaths in South Africa even worse at about 3,000 per week last 2 weeks.
Bulgaria looks like it will be first country to pass the 1% of population dead mark in excess deaths. Currently at 0.87% and that’s before Omicron just starting there. Next is Russia at 0.74% then Novax Serbia at 0.71%. UK currently 0.22% USA 0.32%. Bulgaria’s Delta wave peaked at 2,000 excess deaths a week just a couple of months ago. That would be about equivalent to 20,000/week in UK by population ratio. Chart from https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/18121/basic-page/deaths-bulgaria-weeks
But, but Sweden…
https://www.thelocal.se/20220110/swedish-government-expected-to-announce-new-covid-restrictions/
https://www.thelocal.se/20220109/swedish-crown-princess-and-prince-catch-covid-19-for-the-second-time/
And here’s a look at US deaths from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Last weeks not complete (some States only report monthly) so the drop at end isn’t real.
Preliminary analysis from New York does suggest Omicron is more severe in young children than previous variants
Report at https://health.ny.gov/press/releases/2022/docs/pediatric_covid-19_hospitalization_report.pdf
And in the UK
Nobody seems to have told Omicron it isn’t supposed to kill people.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Meanwhile South Africa excess deaths continue to run at about 3,000 per week for last 3 weeks. Now in normal times most countries running 30% excess deaths for 3 weeks would indicate a big problem but in the new normal – that’s mild apparently. Well I suppose if compared to their staggeringly bad previous waves…
https://www.samrc.ac.za/reports/report-weekly-deaths-south-africa
Maria Van Kerkhove, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist; COVID-19 Technical Lead @WHO, WHO Health Emergencies Programme says Omicron is not mild. Obviously she’s a fool because everyone else knows it is apparently.
New data from South Africa finds Omicron likely has, for unvaccinated and previously uninfected adults, a 25% reduced risk of hospitalization or death within 14 days of admission compared to Delta but that it appears as intrinsically severe as their first “Wuhan” wave. That’s for adults – Data from South Africa and elsewhere continues to point to Omicron actually being more severe than Delta in under 12s.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.12.22269148v1
That fits with Imperial’s research.
Omicron may not target the lungs as much (reduced ability to enhance entry with TMPRSS2 – relevant to lungs) but evidence appears to be growing that damage to heart, kidneys, post-infection diabetes, auto-immune disorders, long covid etc. is at least as bad as Delta and might even be worse due to enhanced fundamental ACE2 entry.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x?s=09
Professor Brian Hjelle writes
And UK risk assessment for severity in children turns from green to amber