The most recent
Hospital Surveillance Update from South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases had this (Highlights, p1) to say about the severity of illness in the fourth COVID-19 wave (from the Omicron variant):
SA NICD report wrote:Among patients who already had a hospital outcome and were no longer still in hospital, during the early third wave, 66.1% of COVID-19 admissions were severe, and during the early fourth wave, 32.9% were severe. However, there was higher percentage of severe admissions among children <20 years during the fourth wave. It must be noted that severity data has several limitations at the early phase of the wave when numbers are small, mild patients are more likely to be admitted as a precaution, patients are diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 incidentally when admitted for other reasons, and because there has not been sufficient follow-up time for severity and outcomes to have emerged.
This
tweet with accompanying chart claims hospital admissions in Gauteng Province (the epicentre of the outbreak in South Africa) are currently doubling every five days.
In the UK,
minutes from the SAGE meeting of 7 December have this:
Minutes for SAGE meeting of 7 December wrote:8. Some early indications from South Africa suggest less severe disease in those hospitalised when compared to previous waves, though this likely reflects at least in part the characteristics of those being admitted to date, who are younger than in previous waves (low confidence). A modest reduction in severity would not avert high numbers of hospitalisations if growth rates remained very high.
9. Although there are several unknown factors, preliminary modelling suggests that without any changes to measures in place, the number of hospitalisations from Omicron may reach 1,000 per day or higher in England by the end of the year (and still be increasing at that point).
10. The overall scale of any wave of hospitalisations without interventions is highly uncertain, but the peak could reach several times this level. The peak is highly likely to be higher than 1,000 to 2,000 Omicron hospital admissions per day without intervention to slow the speed of increasing infections; for it to be below this level there would need to be only a small degree of immune escape and very high protection from boosters against Omicron.
11. The impact of changes in transmissibility and immune escape on overall numbers of admissions is likely to be much more significant than the impact of any changes in severity (high confidence).
Also in the UK, PCR test results with SGTF (SGTF = S-Gene Target Failure, an indicator for Omicron) were up from
2% of cases on 4 December to
6.4% of cases on 6 December.