Do you know how many tens of thousands were positive with a runny nose but never even got tested? People there don't have time for coddled first world sniffles tests. The premise here is faulty by a significant factor (3-4x?) for a realistic representation of omicron hospitalizations based on total real cases. Also oxygen in ICU is 10% compared to 70% for delta. Omicron doesn't go to the lungs. It's extremely mild.
You definitely have a point. A lot of people do not report super mild cases. That was true with Covid since Day 1. Some people I know never reported their covid to authorities.
I wish I could find some report explaining just what are the symptoms that get Omicron cases hospitalized.
I was under the assumption many of the 'hospitalized' were there for other reasons like in the UK but because Omicron is so extremely transmissible they were testing positive while already there. I could be mistaken.
That's what I just commented about. I have an elderly friend who was recently hospitalized here in the USA for normal ol' bacterial pneumonia and she tested positive for SARS-Cov-2, but have zero Covid symptoms. Doctors were totally uninterested and unworried about her positive test result, but she still had to be put in a 'Covid room' so I'm guessing it got recorded as a 'Covid hospitalization' even though it was not.
As I recall, ventilator use took a while to pick up in the alpha wave - so it is early days -doctors really try and delay using ventilators for darn good reasons.
Omicron does go to the lungs, it just replicates less efficiently there than alpha. In the bronchial tube its replicates more efficiently. This does NOT mean the disease (cytokine storm inappropriate immune response, tissue damage) is less severe, It is not KNOWN at this point.
Since most infections are asymptomatic, positivity rates are used to correct for the untested. Watching the positivity numbers for California the last two years, I recall they tended to trend within a narrow band +/- 50% not 400%. May or may not be true for SA - they may run out of tests, for example.
Thanks for the link and observations. I'm staying with my flccc.net protocols no matter what the cdc/fda says. Sorry to say, as a retired ICU RN, they've lost all credibility with me through this.
If it is extremely mild, I'd be interested in your explanation for why covid deaths in South Africa have risen 400% in the past month...and they're definitely not done, as death reporting is a very lagged statistic.
Excess deaths has risen a similar amount, actually a little more.
This hospital data is what we should expect from a highly contagious pathogen. Until shown otherwise, these are largely low-impact nosocomial infections of people in the hospital for something else.
Spoiler alert: Same goes for Delta
Hospitals are breeding grounds for these infections due to the physical conditions of the indoor spaces and the relatively compromised immune systems of the patients. Same story in nursing homes.
Hospitals are incentivized (in some jurisdictions very highly incentivized) to keep the COVID hysteria flowing. Any ill patient in the hospital long enough is going to acquire an upper respiratory infection eventually. Comingling of 'from' and 'with' allows for the construction of any story you want to tell regarding this disease.
We just don't have the information we need to determine the things we want to know. This is unlikely to change.
Exactly, this is what I’ve been saying. Data is flooded with incidental cases where people are in the hospital (or die) from something totally unrelated. This will be even greater with a more contagious variant. Imagine if they started reporting hospitalizations/deaths of people with the common cold.
I have heard that the amount of patients requiring oxygen in SA was quite low. Still not perfect, but probably a better gauge as it at least weeds out more of the incidental hospitalizations I think?
We must also consider seasonality. You compared northern hemisphere countries with South Africa. Whereas we in the north are at our winter solstice, South Africa is at their summer solstice. Because COVID and other infectious respiratory illnesses have high seasonal variation, the north-south comparison will become more clear with time.
My niece is a nurse at a medium-large hospital in Amsterdam, Holland. She says it is currently so busy, lots of fainting people coming in, but no one is covid positive (vaccine side effect?) , they only have one positive case! Mind you, Holland is in a hard lockdown. My neighbors' daughter in law, a young stewardess, was rushed a few times to the ER after vaccination, neighbors saying she is not doing well.
Fainting? I wonder how much of the after effects syndrome is hypochondria? Our society is much less resilient than we used to be. A lot of that is psychological.
My take is that it is very mild based on a surge of cases in my area. A ton of people are getting sick. Some are testing and some aren't but few are headed to hospital and those that do are among the more nervous Nellie count. This differs a a lot from Delta but then again I also thought if was mild. This is just milder. Cold like. Not even a fever now. It's really overrated.
I had Covid a year ago, whatever was the then current version. It was also mild in the sense that I did not go to a hospital (I did go to an outpatient clinic on Day 1 to get tested and get help with stomach flu-like symptoms).
Me too, except no clinic. I self prescribed quercetin and zinc three days, it passed with mild symptoms. "Confirmed" 3 months later with antibody test, which also has a record of false positives. Wife had symptoms few months later during delta wave, same treatment, same result. No symptoms for me. Whole lot of uncertainties in analyzing this episode. Many careers in psychology will be made from this panic.
I've been keeping an eye on Canadian data and one thing I've noticed... The spread is mostly in younger populations, so far. Nursing homes, where a ridiculous amount of deaths occurred, should have an easier to around just due to the exposure in previous waves, so it may look milder. Most cases of covid for the young or middle aged were quite mild before (my in laws had late last year, one barely had a fever and the other a mild cough). I expect the most virus naive populations will have a harder time. I will try to keep tabs on hospitalizations up north where data is available.
That's the problem with a lot of these early studies. They ignore the fact that initial Omicron spread has been mostly among the young - in every country. However, as that shifts more to the old, as every wave has, then we see the true severity.
Thank you for your interpretation. Cases are determined by a defective measuring instrument (pcr). And there goes the data and the graphs. From what one can make out, hospitals are very quiet right now. I was at a social event with colleagues recently. One warned afterwards that he tested positive. I developed symptoms a few days later. Then my wife did also. We didn't go for tests and just took our early treatment meds and are both over whatever we had.
Isn’t August in South Africa the back end of winter? Nov/Dec are summer months. Everything Ivor Cummins has produced shows seasonality of this virus no different than any flu season. I don’t think you accounted for that in the comparison.
I would ask....How many of these people are hospitalized "WITH" Covid vs "FROM" Covid. Does South Africa do a good job of only reporting numbers of people hospitalized due to Covid directly? If it's much more contagious than wouldn't more people being hospitalized for other reasons also test positive given it's rampant spread. My elderly friend was recently hospitalized for bacterial pneumonia and just happened to have a positive PCR for SARS-Cov-2 but had zero Covid symptoms. Doctors were completely uninterested in her positive test results. I am guessing she was still put down as a Covid hospitalization given she had to be put in a Covid room because of the test result.
I heard SA had abandoned testing of asymptomatics. Could that decrease the number of “cases” and thus make the ratio of hospitalizations to cases look higher?
Early assessment of the clinical severity of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in South Africa
Abstract
Background The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant of concern (VOC) almost completely replaced other variants in South Africa during November 2021, and was associated with a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases. We aimed to assess clinical severity of individuals infected with Omicron, using S Gene Target Failure (SGTF) on the Thermo Fisher Scientific TaqPath COVID-19 PCR test as a proxy. Methods We performed data linkages for (i) SARS-CoV-2 laboratory tests, (ii) COVID-19 case data, (iii) genome data, and (iv) the DATCOV national hospital surveillance system for the whole of South Africa. For cases identified using Thermo Fisher TaqPath COVID-19 PCR, infections were designated as SGTF or non-SGTF. Disease severity was assessed using multivariable logistic regression models comparing SGTF-infected individuals diagnosed between 1 October to 30 November to (i) non-SGTF in the same period, and (ii) Delta infections diagnosed between April and November 2021. Results From 1 October through 6 December 2021, 161,328 COVID-19 cases were reported nationally; 38,282 were tested using TaqPath PCR and 29,721 SGTF infections were identified. The proportion of SGTF infections increased from 3% in early October (week 39) to 98% in early December (week 48). On multivariable analysis, after controlling for factors associated with hospitalisation, individuals with SGTF infection had lower odds of being admitted to hospital compared to non-SGTF infections (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 0.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.1-0.3). Among hospitalised individuals, after controlling for factors associated with severe disease, the odds of severe disease did not differ between SGTF-infected individuals compared to non-SGTF individuals diagnosed during the same time period (aOR 0.7, 95% CI 0.3-1.4). Compared to earlier Delta infections, after controlling for factors associated with severe disease, SGTF-infected individuals had a lower odds of severe disease (aOR 0.3, 95% CI 0.2-0.6). Conclusion Early analyses suggest a reduced risk of hospitalisation among SGTF-infected individuals when compared to non-SGTF infected individuals in the same time period, and a reduced risk of severe disease when compared to earlier Delta-infected individuals. Some of this reducton is likely a result of high population immunity.
To push the boosters. I live in Canada and people are truly shaking with fear to the point that in one large town last Saturday (population around 120,000) they queued up for three blocks two and three deep for the booster. The population here is almost totally brainwashed. The fear of the unvaccinated and asymptomatic spread is real (in their minds) and they are totally believing the lie. So few vax AR's have been reported compared to the US VAERS data that I am beginning to think that a) either they are being covered up or b) that most of the gene serums administered here are actually saline and the intent is to implement an electronic tracking system.
Dr McCullough posted an interview on covexit with SA dr chatty. Chetty insists
Omi is mild and hospitalization is people with other issues but test positive with covid. he has treated 7,000 patients
And can see the difference between
The other variants and Omi.
https://t.me/PeterMcCullough/174
Here’s the link
ICU cases would be a much better barometer of illness.
Deaths are the best barometer. Other numbers are gossip.
Yes indeed - and that looks much better, similar to ICU (see here above):
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/
See this SA newspaper graphs, very clear (and it became even clearer since):
https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/breaking-latest-omicron-news-updates-cases-increases-thursday-16-december/
Do you know how many tens of thousands were positive with a runny nose but never even got tested? People there don't have time for coddled first world sniffles tests. The premise here is faulty by a significant factor (3-4x?) for a realistic representation of omicron hospitalizations based on total real cases. Also oxygen in ICU is 10% compared to 70% for delta. Omicron doesn't go to the lungs. It's extremely mild.
You definitely have a point. A lot of people do not report super mild cases. That was true with Covid since Day 1. Some people I know never reported their covid to authorities.
I wish I could find some report explaining just what are the symptoms that get Omicron cases hospitalized.
I was under the assumption many of the 'hospitalized' were there for other reasons like in the UK but because Omicron is so extremely transmissible they were testing positive while already there. I could be mistaken.
That's what I just commented about. I have an elderly friend who was recently hospitalized here in the USA for normal ol' bacterial pneumonia and she tested positive for SARS-Cov-2, but have zero Covid symptoms. Doctors were totally uninterested and unworried about her positive test result, but she still had to be put in a 'Covid room' so I'm guessing it got recorded as a 'Covid hospitalization' even though it was not.
The UK has very good data on this. Incidental covid hospitalizations are rising, but hospitalizations actually for covid are rising just as fast: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1473994500506849282
I saw mention of triple jabbed having trouble breathing. Anecdotal, not hospitalized (yet).
Extreme fatigue can be scary too
And a lot of GI issues and even neurological/movement issues in young people.
As I recall, ventilator use took a while to pick up in the alpha wave - so it is early days -doctors really try and delay using ventilators for darn good reasons.
Omicron does go to the lungs, it just replicates less efficiently there than alpha. In the bronchial tube its replicates more efficiently. This does NOT mean the disease (cytokine storm inappropriate immune response, tissue damage) is less severe, It is not KNOWN at this point.
e.g., http://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-cov-2-infection
Since most infections are asymptomatic, positivity rates are used to correct for the untested. Watching the positivity numbers for California the last two years, I recall they tended to trend within a narrow band +/- 50% not 400%. May or may not be true for SA - they may run out of tests, for example.
Thanks for the link and observations. I'm staying with my flccc.net protocols no matter what the cdc/fda says. Sorry to say, as a retired ICU RN, they've lost all credibility with me through this.
I too.
If it is extremely mild, I'd be interested in your explanation for why covid deaths in South Africa have risen 400% in the past month...and they're definitely not done, as death reporting is a very lagged statistic.
Excess deaths has risen a similar amount, actually a little more.
This hospital data is what we should expect from a highly contagious pathogen. Until shown otherwise, these are largely low-impact nosocomial infections of people in the hospital for something else.
Spoiler alert: Same goes for Delta
Hospitals are breeding grounds for these infections due to the physical conditions of the indoor spaces and the relatively compromised immune systems of the patients. Same story in nursing homes.
Hospitals are incentivized (in some jurisdictions very highly incentivized) to keep the COVID hysteria flowing. Any ill patient in the hospital long enough is going to acquire an upper respiratory infection eventually. Comingling of 'from' and 'with' allows for the construction of any story you want to tell regarding this disease.
We just don't have the information we need to determine the things we want to know. This is unlikely to change.
Exactly, this is what I’ve been saying. Data is flooded with incidental cases where people are in the hospital (or die) from something totally unrelated. This will be even greater with a more contagious variant. Imagine if they started reporting hospitalizations/deaths of people with the common cold.
I have heard that the amount of patients requiring oxygen in SA was quite low. Still not perfect, but probably a better gauge as it at least weeds out more of the incidental hospitalizations I think?
Until you look at excess death data, which is readily available. And it correlates very well to covid surges.
We must also consider seasonality. You compared northern hemisphere countries with South Africa. Whereas we in the north are at our winter solstice, South Africa is at their summer solstice. Because COVID and other infectious respiratory illnesses have high seasonal variation, the north-south comparison will become more clear with time.
My niece is a nurse at a medium-large hospital in Amsterdam, Holland. She says it is currently so busy, lots of fainting people coming in, but no one is covid positive (vaccine side effect?) , they only have one positive case! Mind you, Holland is in a hard lockdown. My neighbors' daughter in law, a young stewardess, was rushed a few times to the ER after vaccination, neighbors saying she is not doing well.
People in my town are getting really messed up with the third dose. I don’t know what the fourth will be like. 🙄
Is it possible this is related to the particular PCR test being used? It looks like some tests don't detect Omicron.
Fainting? I wonder how much of the after effects syndrome is hypochondria? Our society is much less resilient than we used to be. A lot of that is psychological.
My take is that it is very mild based on a surge of cases in my area. A ton of people are getting sick. Some are testing and some aren't but few are headed to hospital and those that do are among the more nervous Nellie count. This differs a a lot from Delta but then again I also thought if was mild. This is just milder. Cold like. Not even a fever now. It's really overrated.
I had Covid a year ago, whatever was the then current version. It was also mild in the sense that I did not go to a hospital (I did go to an outpatient clinic on Day 1 to get tested and get help with stomach flu-like symptoms).
Me too, except no clinic. I self prescribed quercetin and zinc three days, it passed with mild symptoms. "Confirmed" 3 months later with antibody test, which also has a record of false positives. Wife had symptoms few months later during delta wave, same treatment, same result. No symptoms for me. Whole lot of uncertainties in analyzing this episode. Many careers in psychology will be made from this panic.
I've been keeping an eye on Canadian data and one thing I've noticed... The spread is mostly in younger populations, so far. Nursing homes, where a ridiculous amount of deaths occurred, should have an easier to around just due to the exposure in previous waves, so it may look milder. Most cases of covid for the young or middle aged were quite mild before (my in laws had late last year, one barely had a fever and the other a mild cough). I expect the most virus naive populations will have a harder time. I will try to keep tabs on hospitalizations up north where data is available.
Covid always was a mild disease -- for MOST people.
It's easy to keep the death count down - you just don't stuff infected people into old aged homes (again)
That's the problem with a lot of these early studies. They ignore the fact that initial Omicron spread has been mostly among the young - in every country. However, as that shifts more to the old, as every wave has, then we see the true severity.
I suggest you look at NYC, which as in early 2020 is ahead of the curve for rest of US. Hospitalizations there are skyrocketing, and ICU (lagged a bit) is also rising quickly: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary
Thank you for your interpretation. Cases are determined by a defective measuring instrument (pcr). And there goes the data and the graphs. From what one can make out, hospitals are very quiet right now. I was at a social event with colleagues recently. One warned afterwards that he tested positive. I developed symptoms a few days later. Then my wife did also. We didn't go for tests and just took our early treatment meds and are both over whatever we had.
I just do what I can, man! I wish I could give the most accurate test to every South African person every day.
But with all the imperfections, I tried to compare apples with apples -- 4 week periods with one week lags.
Keep doing this good work, Igor.
Isn’t August in South Africa the back end of winter? Nov/Dec are summer months. Everything Ivor Cummins has produced shows seasonality of this virus no different than any flu season. I don’t think you accounted for that in the comparison.
I just compares apples to apples, erm, 4 weeks cases to 4 weeks hospitalizations
Hi Igor, you can use the data on pandata.org when you prep articles. Also influenced by pcr but the owner, Nic Hudson, is an actuary.
I would tend to disagree.
There is a very good interview with a researcher from the University of Johannesburg, Pieter Streicher on UnHerd:
https://unherd.com/thepost/deep-data-dive-is-omicron-the-end-of-the-pandemic/
The duration of hospitalization with Omicron is vastly lower than Delta i.e. people are far less sick.
Does it account for age and prior gained immunity?
I would ask....How many of these people are hospitalized "WITH" Covid vs "FROM" Covid. Does South Africa do a good job of only reporting numbers of people hospitalized due to Covid directly? If it's much more contagious than wouldn't more people being hospitalized for other reasons also test positive given it's rampant spread. My elderly friend was recently hospitalized for bacterial pneumonia and just happened to have a positive PCR for SARS-Cov-2 but had zero Covid symptoms. Doctors were completely uninterested in her positive test results. I am guessing she was still put down as a Covid hospitalization given she had to be put in a Covid room because of the test result.
UK does a good job separating the two: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1473994500506849282 Both are rising fast in London.
If Omicron is in fact milder than Delta then it would also almostly certainly be true that there would be far more uncounted cases.
milder and more contagious.
Right.
I heard SA had abandoned testing of asymptomatics. Could that decrease the number of “cases” and thus make the ratio of hospitalizations to cases look higher?
Well, this is rather contradictory given other studies just released claiming hospital admission rates for omicron are just a fifth (!) of those for delta. See this post which refers to a study in SA and to one in the UK: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/22/omicron-hospitalisation-rate-just-a-fifth-of-delta-study-from-south-africa-finds/
I don’t really know what to think anymore. In any case, I hope Omicron is mild and helps wipe out the pandemic.
I hope so too
This preprint focused on the exact same topic may be of interest: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v1
Early assessment of the clinical severity of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in South Africa
Abstract
Background The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant of concern (VOC) almost completely replaced other variants in South Africa during November 2021, and was associated with a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases. We aimed to assess clinical severity of individuals infected with Omicron, using S Gene Target Failure (SGTF) on the Thermo Fisher Scientific TaqPath COVID-19 PCR test as a proxy. Methods We performed data linkages for (i) SARS-CoV-2 laboratory tests, (ii) COVID-19 case data, (iii) genome data, and (iv) the DATCOV national hospital surveillance system for the whole of South Africa. For cases identified using Thermo Fisher TaqPath COVID-19 PCR, infections were designated as SGTF or non-SGTF. Disease severity was assessed using multivariable logistic regression models comparing SGTF-infected individuals diagnosed between 1 October to 30 November to (i) non-SGTF in the same period, and (ii) Delta infections diagnosed between April and November 2021. Results From 1 October through 6 December 2021, 161,328 COVID-19 cases were reported nationally; 38,282 were tested using TaqPath PCR and 29,721 SGTF infections were identified. The proportion of SGTF infections increased from 3% in early October (week 39) to 98% in early December (week 48). On multivariable analysis, after controlling for factors associated with hospitalisation, individuals with SGTF infection had lower odds of being admitted to hospital compared to non-SGTF infections (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 0.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.1-0.3). Among hospitalised individuals, after controlling for factors associated with severe disease, the odds of severe disease did not differ between SGTF-infected individuals compared to non-SGTF individuals diagnosed during the same time period (aOR 0.7, 95% CI 0.3-1.4). Compared to earlier Delta infections, after controlling for factors associated with severe disease, SGTF-infected individuals had a lower odds of severe disease (aOR 0.3, 95% CI 0.2-0.6). Conclusion Early analyses suggest a reduced risk of hospitalisation among SGTF-infected individuals when compared to non-SGTF infected individuals in the same time period, and a reduced risk of severe disease when compared to earlier Delta-infected individuals. Some of this reducton is likely a result of high population immunity.
Deaths are the better measure I think. These are 1/4 those of Delta.
1/6 or less, actually.
They are still rising. Way too early to compare to Delta.
The question is, if it isn’t milder, why (when they live ramping up the fear levels) are they telling us it is?
To push the boosters. I live in Canada and people are truly shaking with fear to the point that in one large town last Saturday (population around 120,000) they queued up for three blocks two and three deep for the booster. The population here is almost totally brainwashed. The fear of the unvaccinated and asymptomatic spread is real (in their minds) and they are totally believing the lie. So few vax AR's have been reported compared to the US VAERS data that I am beginning to think that a) either they are being covered up or b) that most of the gene serums administered here are actually saline and the intent is to implement an electronic tracking system.