Think you might be missing a digit there, DaveS!

With the majority of (a large number) of people having mild Covid with Omicron is there now a growing dis-connect between the reported deaths after positive test and the deaths of some-one who actually dies due to Covid?

Sorry, not sure i explained the question very well!

In the UK context you would be considered boostered so long as there was at least 91 days (arguably 84 days) between the J&J and the mRNA vaccine plus that second vaccine was after 1 October. In a UK context you can't have another jab right now unless immuno suppressed and a few other factors. Being up to date with your vaccines hasn't been formally defined yet in terms of travel restrictions, but my guess is that it will be something like having had a vaccine in the last 6 months or so, or ineligible for any further dose. That said very few people in Europe had J&J so it's going to be a niche case.

Are you perhaps asking "is the elevated death rate really reflective of the virus, or reflective of more people dying when by coincidence there is a lot of Omicron around?"

And the answer is that dying with COVID isn't a lot different that dying of COVID. It's a very difficult area and there are guidelines, but the test I tend to make is that if there was zero Omicron around, would these people have death deferred to a later date. And it's a plain fact that after something like 50 years of improvements to longevity we have now had 2 years of reduced longevity, and if the current trend continues, a third year of deterioration. For females there hasn't been much change, it's flatlining rather than improving, for men the reduction is pretty stark, we have regressed to about 2012 - and of course those charts upthread from ICARN make that point rather strongly in terms of risk for the male gender. I don't have anything more than a gut feel for this but I suspect that Omicron for the unvaccinated is actually pretty much as deadly as Alpha. Calling Omicron a cold, or like a cold is somewhat misleading. We will know more in about 2 weeks, particularly in comparison with other countries, where the demography of vaccination is different to the UK.

Thanks, yes exactly that.

The jump in recorded covid deaths to 400 per day looks scary, but it doesn't seem to reflect that omicron is milder, and presumably is itself causing less serious illness, as reflected in the ICU figures?.
.

Seems quite telling that ICU numbers are falling even when hospitalisation and deaths are (with the delay) rising, and despite huge case numbers.

It's causing just as much serious illness by the ICU figures, since there is one group that dominates critical care. ICU is mainly the unvaccinated younger people now, it can't be compared to a year ago since then the median age was 70, now the median age is 50 (and younger still for men). ICU is now about 70% unvaccinated compared to 8% adult population unvaccinated. About 650 people - out of 780 - are in ICU right now who should not be there. The very elderiy and frail don't go to ICU, ICU is typically not going to save their lives, and Omicron can be fatal for these people. For those unvaccinated, very old, immuno-suppresed or on one vaccine taken more than 6 months ago, Omicron is not to my mind milder, there are a lot of people in these groups and frankly, Omicron is a killer.

Bearing in mind people can be in hospital for weeks, is the breakdown of deaths between outgoing Delta and dominant Omicron understood (or even sufficiently recorded)? Who is dying right now? Is this still a malady of the very frail and the unvaccinated?

I'm not sure Omicron is any milder. Its impact on those vaccinated is muted. It is killing the unvaccinated, and not all deaths occur in ICU.


OK, CWS already said the same thing. But better :)

I don't know if gov.uk has the same data, but here is the Sole24ore (the Italian's FT) data for Italy. I guess the keys are pretty easy to understand apart from "ricoveri" (=hospitalisations), "TI" (=ICU) and "decessi" (=deaths).


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...b3b97e25d5.png

88% of deaths in the 40-59 age bracket are unvaccinated. Half of the deaths in the 60-79 cohort are unvaccinated, and 36% in the 80+ cohort. Mind you, the overall % of unvaccinated people in these 3 age brackets are approx. 11% in the 40-59 range, approx 7% in the 60-79 and 4% in the 80+. So, bottom line, although only 11% of 40-59s aren't vaccinated, they account for 88% of Covid deaths.

Are the UK cases vastly underestimated in the last 30 days, like by a factor of 15 or 20? Did half of the UK population really get Omicron? I'm a bit skeptical. I can't figure out why WHO thinks half of Europe will get Omicron.

The official statistics will always understate the number of cases, but not by 15-20 times. The ONS provides data on current infection levels. In the week up to 6th January they estimated 1/15 people in England would test positive. It is not hard to see how a few weeks at those levels gets to a very high overall figure. Saying half of Europe will get omicron is just a guess by the WHO.

This was a projection or forecast from a respected American health research institute which takes global numbers, crunches them up, and then projects forward using fairly broad brush forecasting and projections. Projection is a mathematical continuation, forecasting is different. The more detailed you delve into it, the less accurate it is, and the reverse if also true, the more global you look at the forecasts and projections the more you will get at accurate sense for how things are going directionally. So this wasn't the WHO saying "this will happen", it was an WHO official noting that a particular projection has been given. One thing this institute tries to emulate is to say if you increase mask wearing or increase vaccination rates then you will reduce hospital use by x, so I think there is a value here, but as always in a context which is difficult to get across in the Age of Twitter.

So that instiute has projected that ICU beds needed in the UK on 11 January was 4289, with CI giving a range of 2492 to 8510 beds. The actual usage was 793 beds. The projection continues to suggest that we will need 5720 beds by the peak date of 22 January - well we simply don't have that many beds anyway, and the CWS forecast is that it will be 740 beds on that date. So somewhat different. Now to be fair they did project that the UK would hit Peak Omicron on 4 January with 1.4 million cases, and that seems about right to me (200k cases x 7 days). Looking at it from a distance it seems they are using USA levels of public health implementations, rather than what actually happens in the UK, where social interaction is actually sharply down on a typical January. Incidentally that projection suggest the UK case rate will be about half of that peak on 23 January.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/unite...est=infections

Self-isolation time cut to 'five full days' in England
 

From BBC Live feed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-59977092

The reduction in self isolation time will also apply to those travelling who get a positive day2 post arrival test result. In reality, quite a few people will show positive Laterals on day4, so I think this is more of a 6 day move than 5 days. There are some shifting sands here, since in theory far fewer people will be taking PCRs, so their date of infection will be one day earlier.