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An employee in a US hospital puts on protective clothing to enter the Covid intensive care unit
Photo: JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP
Scientists from the US state of California and the US health authority CDC have published a new, as yet unchecked study that suggests: Compared to the Delta variant, Omikron leads to less serious illnesses and thus to a significantly lower number of hospital admissions.
The results of the study coincide with previous studies from South Africa, Great Britain and Denmark.
Data from almost 70,000 infected people
The data from electronic health records of almost 70,000 people who tested positive for the coronavirus between November 30 and January 1 were evaluated.
The omicron variant was detected in around three quarters of the samples, the remaining infections were caused by the delta variant.
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Covid patients who came to hospitals because of other complaints and who only tested positive for the coronavirus on arrival were excluded from the study.
Compared to Delta, Omicron infections were only half as likely to be associated with a hospital stay: According to the study, 235 of 52,297 Omicron cases and 222 of 16,982 people who were infected with the Delta variant were hospitalized.
This results in a hospitalization rate of 0.5 percent for Omikron and 1.3 percent for Delta.
Shorter hospital stays, fewer deaths
According to the scientists involved, no patient from the group of those infected with Omikron had to be connected to a ventilator.
One person from the Omikron group died, according to the researchers, there were 14 deaths in the group of the Delta variant.
The risk of death - at least according to the data of this study - is 91 percent lower.
In addition, the results of the pre-print publication had shown that Omikron patients who were admitted to the hospital could be discharged again after a shorter period of time.
The variant shortens hospital stays by more than three days - that would correspond to a reduction of 70 percent compared to Delta.
What are the causes?
The evaluated data do not provide any information about the reasons for the less severe courses.
A possible cause is that many people - due to a vaccination or a previous infection - have a stronger immune defense.
However, the pathogen may have changed in such a way that the disease is generally less severe: Various studies have already shown that omicrons reproduce less well in the lungs, but faster in the cells of the upper respiratory tract and in the bronchi.
That could explain both why the gradients are milder and why the variant is so much more contagious than its predecessors.
more on the subject
Coronavirus variant: What is known about Omikron - and what we still cannot know by Viola Kiel
But even with milder courses, Omikron will still pose major problems for health care: Because the variant is spreading so quickly, the number of new infections every day in the USA is higher than ever since the outbreak of the pandemic.
Currently, more than 730,000 people test positive every day.
Even a hospitalization rate of 0.5 percent, as suggested by the new study, arithmetically leads to 3,650 hospital admissions - per day.
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