Observations on COVID case rates and hospitalisations with Omicron
Usual caveats abound, I am not a doctor or a scientist. If you want to read actual, proper research, go read a research or medical journal. Seriously, do. Certainly do not draw any conclusions or modify your behaviour based on anything someone posts on Medium! I will continue to base my behaviour on scientific consensus of the people we’ve collectively paid billions to train and equip for just this sort of thing, I’m not going to ignore them and neither should anyone else.
This post is pure armchair observationalism (is that a word even?) … I’m not even particularly fussed about COVID, but I do find data and graphs and correlations and how they link with policy and doctrine fascinating. I’m sure people far cleverer than I am are looking at the same data and doing actual studies of it, that will doubtless be released in due course after proper peer review. This is my half-baked and unreliable brain-dump.
THERE. Health warnings over with.
So I’ve noticed that since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in France there’s been about a week long gap, perhaps slightly longer, between the case peak and the hospitalisations peak pretty much everywhere. For about a year and a half I kept my own charts, feeding ARS data into a spreadsheet twice a week, until I got bored. But it means I’m reasonably familiar with the patterns (that’s probably why I got bored).
First wave here in Occitanie, cases peaked around 1st April 2020 and hospitalisations around the 7th April 2020. Second wave was basically six months long, but it had distinct peaks. For two of those peaks cases peaked around 3rd November 2020 and 16th April 2021, with hospitalisations peaking around 13th November 2020 and 23rd April 2021 respectively. It’s pretty consistent.
What struck me last night as I was looking at the current data is I was kind of expecting — given Omicron is supposed to be milder but far more contagious and cases are off the charts — to see hospitalisations to bumble along around the 75–80% full mark they plateaued at in early January 2022. But that’s not happening, they’re dropping like a stone, just like they did after every other wave. Nevertheless, the infection rate is off the chart and actually still climbing — France posted over 400,000 cases a day all this past week.
This same pattern is happening for the whole of France, albeit with broader periods because the figures are averaged out by region, so they flatten as infections spread out from points and migrate to hit different places.
To my unscientific brain this looks like it can only be a wave within a wave. It doesn’t make sense hospitalisations are dropping while cases are rising, unless we had a Delta wave that began to ebb around the turn of the year and what we’re seeing is the peak of people who were sick with Delta passing in the hospitals.
Omicron really hit the Gard around 26th December 2021, you can see it, it announces itself with a massive acceleration of cases, and cases per day are still rising. (It actually arrived more like 20th December, but started romping away right after Christmas — here’s the government data — I filtered on ‘département’ and selected Gard.) It was about 60% of tested cases around New Years Day 2022 and that tallies precisely with the passing Delta wave (see the next chart down on that page). So it seems, from simple observation at least, pretty likely the hospitalisation wave that’s clearly passing was specifically linked to the Delta wave that passed over the region in the run-up to Christmas — not Omicron.
For me there are two ways to read this:
- The worst case is there’s another wave of Omicron hospitalisations just over the horizon and those hospitalisation stats are about to rocket again — potentially even more severely; or
- The initial observations from medics in South Africa appears to be bearing out and Omicron isn’t just a bit milder, it’s a helluvalot milder than previous variants.
I haven’t seen any data about people who are hospitalised and whether they were and are being hospitalised with Delta or Omicron. The data must exist, but I imagine it’s being studied behind closed doors for now.
I’m not going to throw my masks in the bin, and I’m happy I got my booster shot and my kids are vaccinated. But I’m also quietly hopeful that the second of the two above scenarios turns out to be the case, and we’re finally passing the worst of what’s been a pretty shitty 2 years!
