Omicron Is Worse Than Thought
Against all hopes, hospitalisations and deaths are rising
Omicron threatens our health infrastructure in two ways: Mild infections cause massive short-term worker shortage and severe infections bring more patients to the ICUs (ITUs), and death numbers already following suit in some countries. The data contradict preliminary studies showing that the course of the actual disease could be milder, i.g. because it does not infect the lungs (slashdot) or because British hospitalisations and deaths are not increasing (BBC), but in our insatiable appetite of immediate data we often forget that good data take time.
Maybe this also has to do with data becoming unreliable. In terms of testing date, Washington State has stopped reporting months ago, Germany, Britain have not reported any for two weeks and the USA is a week behind. The probable cause: lack of testing kits, lack of personnel and an overwhelming number of people who need to be tested. This is a bad sign because it means that we do not really know how many people are truly infected, which is also manifest in the skyrocketing test-positive rates (above my graphs in all countries). It also foreshadows an underreporting in hospital and death numbers. For the coming months we will be flying more blindly than ever before.
This said, all countries show a steep increase in people testing positive, Germany included.
I should probably mention again that my graphs show data on the logarithmic scale, which makes peaks look less severe. But it allows the aggregation of several curves with different scales on the same graph.
| Daily Incidence | Daily ICU | Daily Deaths | Daily Pos. Rate | Average Excess Death | Death Projection | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USA | 202.2 ↑ | 6.2 ↗︎ | 0.471 ↗︎ | 26.5 % ↑ | 15.8 % | ↗︎↘︎ |
| WA State | 134.3 ↑ | 1.9 ↗︎ | 0.178 → | 10.7 % | ↗︎↘︎ | |
| Britain | 265.2 ↑ | 1.3 ↗︎ | 0.236 ↑ | 10.0 % | 13.0 % | ↘︎ |
| France | 329.1 ↑ | 5.4 ↗︎ | 0.314 ↗︎ | 12.4 % ↑ | 12.4 % | ↗︎↓ |
| Germany | 052.7 ↑ | 4.4 ↘︎ | 0.308 ↘︎ | 16.5 % | 07.3 % | ↗︎↘︎ |
| Tunisia | 012.9 ↑ | 0.7 ↗︎ | 0.089 ↗︎ | 12.3 % ↑ | 18.9 % | ↗︎↘︎ |
On my graphs, the topmost blue line stands for the number of people who tested positive on a given day. The press refers to this number as "Covid cases."
This is false, gravely misleading and extremely disappointing.
False because these numbers represent mere positive test results. Whether an individual develops Covid-19 symptoms is only recorded when they end up in the hospital. Mild Covid-19 symptoms are not recorded anywhere. The majority of these individuals are clearly not Covid cases.
Misleading because by labelling these individuals as "cases" makes matters look worse than they actually are. In reality, the vast majority of the positive-tested individuals will not develop any symptoms or only very mild ones.
Disappointing because the press have not learnt much in two years about correct reporting. I mentioned this in my blog in July of 2020 (link) and nothing seems to have changed since.
On a related note, the press are still reporting absolute numbers, which is sensationalism at best and, again, misleading at worst. Just the other day, the USA had one million infections per day and it made the news because it sounded big. On this very same most European countries had much higher incidences per capita. But it was not reported because the absolute numbers did not feel alarming.
I already remarked on this sensationalism in October of 2020 (link) and around the same time I had an interesting discussion with an otherwise highly regarded German news outlet in this matter, which, not surprisingly, amounted to nothing.