Uddrag fra det medicinske tidsskrift Statnews / statusrapport fra lørdag fra The South African Research Council:
Grafen viser, at antallet af smittetilfælde i den hårdest ramte sydafrikanske provins Geuteng stiger kraftigt, men antallet af døde stiger ikke. Det påpeges, at der kan være et lag mellem smitte/ indlæggelser og udvikling af alvorlige symptomer > Figure 2 below shows the absence of any significant increase in in-hospitals deaths in relation to the dramatic rise in the case rate for the Gauteng Province as a whole. This may be due to the usual lag between cases and deaths and the trend will become clearer over the next few weeks.
A significant early finding in this analysis is the much shorter average length of stay of 2.8 days for SARS-CoV-2 positive patients admitted to the COVID wards over the last two weeks compared to an average length of stay of 8.5 days for the past 18 months. The NICD reports a similar shorter length of stay for all hospitals in Tshwane in its weekly report. It is also less than the Gauteng or National average length of stay reported by the NICD in previous waves.
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A South African health researcher said early data suggests the Omicron variant of coronavirus is highly transmissible, but has a less than 1% chance of re-infection and typically results in “milder” disease.
Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, Professor Willem Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa said: “We know three things that we didn’t know last week, the first thing is that the virus is spreading extraordinarily fast in South Africa, the increase in cases is much steeper than it’s been in the past three waves.”
He said data on reinfections suggests after someone has COVID they have a less than 1% chance of getting the disease again.
“The third little bit of data we have already relates to clinical cases and how severe the disease is,” he added.
“The only data suggests the disease may occur more in younger people and mostly younger people who are unvaccinated and overall so far the disease has appeared to be milder but again I want to say we have to be cautious – these are very early days.”
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As the world waits for studies that give a clear picture of the Omicron variant, early clinical data emerging from South Africa hint at a virus that may cause less severe cases of Covid-19.
The South African Medical Research Council posted a report Saturday of the early experiences at several hospitals in Gauteng Province, where Omicron was first spotted in the country. Strikingly, most hospitalized patients who tested positive for Covid did not need supplemental oxygen. Few developed Covid pneumonia, few required high-level care, and fewer still were admitted to intensive care.
Experts caution against reading too much into these early reports, which are based on small numbers of patients. They suggest it will take time for the true profile of the Omicron variant to come into focus. But several note that while early discussions about previous variants of concern have hinged on trying to figure out whether they caused more severe disease, with Omicron the questions relate to whether it is associated with milder infections.
The report included an analysis of 42 Covid patients in the hospital on Dec. 2 which showed that most were actually hospitalized for other medical reasons; their infections were only detected because hospitals are testing all incoming patients for Covid. Many did not have respiratory symptoms. And the average length of hospital stay was 2.8 days, far shorter than the average of 8.5 days recorded in the region over the past 18 months, the report said.
“The relatively low number of Covid-19 pneumonia hospitalizations in the general, high care and ICU wards constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves,” said the report, authored by Fareed Abdullah, director of the SAMRC’s office of AIDS and TB research.
