Analysis – Saturday, 7 May 2022

Hard To Spot Trends
Tests are down, reporting more sporadic

Many signs point at a flaring up of the numbers during summer caused by new, more proliferative Omicron subvariants. But we might miss the beginning of this new trend and will thus not be able to act early enough. This could further aggravate issues.

The recent rise of the incidence in the USA that was caused by older omicron variants, which have already peaked in Europe, might further obscure increases caused by newer omicron variants. In addition, many states have moved to a weekly reporting of numbers. Combined with a still too-low vaccination rate (although seeming to pick up lately), mortality could go up this summer as well.

Tunisia too is reporting only weekly. Testing is at an all-time low making the (estimated) actual number of cases 30x higher than the reported ones. There is a small sign of a potential increase in mortality. The next weeks will tell if this is a trend or the beginning of the bottoming-out of the curve, which ranks among the lowest in the world. But there are still 16 people dying every week of Corona-related illness.

Incidences in Britain, France and Germany are falling nicely but they will probably remain too high until the end of summer, while hospitalisations and deaths should continue their drop to very low numbers. This would then by typical of an endemic situation.