Norman Potting
Well-known member
Daughter had no problem in booking her booster on line this morning - a queue but quite a short one.
This is the difference between Omicron & Delta in my non-scientific opinion:
16th Dec figures:
97% Omicron - South Africa: Infections 24k, deaths 34.
90%+ Delta - Poland: Infections 22k, deaths 592.
Delta is absolutely lethal.
The sooner we are at 97% Omicron in this Country, the better. Hopefully the mass Omicron infections we are seeing can help.
This is the difference between Omicron & Delta in my non-scientific opinion:
16th Dec figures:
97% Omicron - South Africa: Infections 24k, deaths 34.
90%+ Delta - Poland: Infections 22k, deaths 592.
Delta is absolutely lethal.
The sooner we are at 97% Omicron in this Country, the better. Hopefully the mass Omicron infections we are seeing can help.
Fascinating, and incredibly positive.
A couple of things worth noting on this, as making sense of the relationships between cases and deaths is a little trickier than it looks at first glance. First off, it should be expected that like-for-like case:death ratios to be lower for Omicron because it spreads more quickly, so infections in South Africa would have been a fair bit lower three weeks ago than they would have been in Poland.
However, and stick with me because I know what thread this is; even if you factor that in, all of the data I've looked at (and I'm a saddo so I've looked at quite a bit), Omicron appears to be between 5 and 6 times less lethal than Delta.
There's more though. The fact that we are still seeing death figures in South Africa so low several weeks after its official discovery is hugely encouraging. South Africa does not have the testing regimen that we do in the UK, so they're going to be picking up far fewer cases 'in the wild', especially if cases are milder with Omicron.
They will however be getting picked up when people arrive in hospital. However, with the virus becoming so prevalent and so many people having it at the same time, the number of incidental cases (e.g. people coming into hospitals and / or dying) because of heart attacks, car accidents and so on is going to be substantially higher than we've previously seen. So if we're seeing 30 Covid deaths in South Africa currently, it's reasonable to assume that many of these are either Delta or something completely unrelated.
Keep in mind this does mean that in time we will begin to see some slightly scary figures in terms of cases and deaths in South Africa, the UK and around the world. However, by the time that happens I honestly, firmly believe it will have been concluded that Omicron is a far, far less lethal virus than its predecessors.
9 out of 10 people in hospital with Covid are unvaccinated. Proves that vaccines are really helping.
Downside is that these people are taking up hospital beds they probably wouldn't have needed if they had been vaccinated.
Whilst its far from complete data as only from one country, but the case is building we should be back tracking on restrictions shortly and Wales have completely over reacted.
28m boostered.
The daily average over the last 7 days was 699,000!
Sauce: bbc tv news.