UK Omicron cases now being treated in hospital

[summermode]

The breaking news just popped on my phone: Omicron cases now being treated in hospital, cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi tells Sky News

https://apple.news/Aa4ipTTrQtiVeacyE0bb_UA

Finger cross omicron is as mild as we hoped and the hospitalized cases had underlying problems/unvaccinated

@NightmareSlashDelightful

Look at how carefully this story is worded. They're not saying in hospital because of omicron.

My read on this is that they're testing in hospitals and finding cases.

Exactly this.

Why is this surprising?

• has everyone forgotten what happened when earlier variants emerged?
• did everyone fail science/maths at school?

It's inevitable that hospitalisations will occur with any emerging highly transmittable variant. There will always be vulnerable members of the population that it will hit harder than others.

And it might be milder, and direct fatalities might be lower. But every Covid hospitalisation is a bed not available for the treatment of any other condition and this is what will kill people.

People will die of cancer, strokes, and other conditions that could have been treated/saved because NHS beds and resources are occupied by Covid patients. That's why infections have to be controlled and the spread of the disease slowed. That is why the antivaxers have blood on their hands.

@WineGetsMeThroughIt

The person could have gone in with a broken leg, had a sniffle abs as a result they were tested for corona.

They tested positive for omicron and Boom! Now you've got cases of omicron in hospital.

There's no context abs it's a lot of scaremongering

Whatever makes you feel better. It's almost certainly not the case.

The hospitalisations in SA were less ill. Fewer require oxygen, fewer require critical care and the lengths of the hospital stays are shorter. Telling us simply that there are people in hospital with omicron tells us very little.

@DogInATent Mumsnet doesn't want anything critical said about the anti-vaxxers. No matter how clear it seems that misleading people about vaccine efficacy and safety leads to avoidable deaths. MNHQ are highly invested in maintaining a space where Covid denialism is welcome.

@JanglyBeads

The chief medical officers have said that these people have been hospitalised BECAUSE of covid:

BNO Newsroom reports

UK chief medical officers: "Data on severity will become clearer over the coming weeks but hospitalisations from Omicron are already occurring and these are likely to increase rapidly"

See my earlier post.

Boris would not be leaving his newborn daughter / latest party to broadcast to us on a Sunday evening were this not very serious.
Can people not see that?

"Telling us simply that there are people in hospital with omicron tells us very little."

Actually it tells us plenty about how the next few weeks and months going to be.

If you take your fingers out your ears and stop bleating that's 'its just a mild cold' you might actually grasp what's going on here.

Boris would not be leaving his newborn daughter / latest party to broadcast to us on a Sunday evening were this not very serious.
Can people not see that?

It's pre-recorded.

BJ will be prerecorded so he isn't leaving anyone on a Sunday evening

What is the no evidence of cytokine storm after ten days with omicron?

LBC on this morning and will be repeated soon.

Boris would not be leaving his newborn daughter

He leaves loads of children.

Boris would not be leaving his newborn daughter / latest party to broadcast to us on a Sunday evening were this not very serious
Can people not see that?

I can see that Omicron and cases in hospital are just what he wants and needs, takes all the focus of his party antics.

We have had 1000s going into hospital with Delta, 2000 in ICU & around a 1000 per week dying, yet it was all "so what!" from him and the govt.

So, no, i don't believe BJ is doing his broadcast at 8 pm for our good at all.

@ChequerBoard

"Telling us simply that there are people in hospital with omicron tells us very little."

Actually it tells us plenty about how the next few weeks and months going to be.

If you take your fingers out your ears and stop bleating that's 'its just a mild cold' you might actually grasp what's going on here.

It really doesn’t.

And I haven’t ‘bleated’ that ‘it’s a mild cold’. I have, however, quoted scientists/medics in SA/the WHO and the CDC who have reported that so far it appears to be milder than delta. The data shows fewer hospitalisations and fewer seriously ill patients compared to the same stage of delta. Obviously it is still early days and, as I have said on many other posts, we still need to wait and see but, so far, the news is positive.

You should try spending less time hurling insults and false accusations at people and a bit more time reading what they’ve actually written and looking at the official data reports from SA.

Boris would not be leaving his newborn daughter / latest party to broadcast to us on a Sunday evening were this not very serious
Can people not see that?

Boris wouldn't know "very serious" if it slapped him across the ---- cheeks with a double-bass. He laughs off everything behind that insincere smile and buffoonish hair of his.

He's going to try and look Churchillian. He's going to fail. It'll be waffle and piffle, but it won't be new restrictions. He's not allowed to do the presidential thing he'd like to try under the rules of UK government, although so far Hoyle seems fairly toothless in the sanctions he's willing to impose on Johnson. Any new restrictions have to be announced to Parliament first, and they're not sitting. And if accounts are true, he's planning on ending the pre-Christmas session of Parliament early in any case.

@DogInATent
Thank you for saying what a lot of us are thinking. The whole issue in your last paragraph

The idea that Boris Johnson is personally caring for his newborn and toddler (I’ve heard reporters talk of sleepless nights)?

Seriously?

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤯

I’m as cynical about Johnson as the next MNer, but OK, let’s put it another a way: he wouldn’t be doing this and risking more loss of support from the CRG etc unless he really had to.

Just to put that into (anecdotal) context, when we test for Covid in hospital we run a full respiratory virus screen. This means that we detect rhinovirus, coronavirus, parainfluenza, influenza and many other respiratory viruses, some of which cause the common cold. Many of the patients in whom we detect these viruses are asymptomatic to them, yet they are in hospital and they have these viruses.....

@JanglyBeads

I’m as cynical about Johnson as the next MNer, but OK, let’s put it another a way: he wouldn’t be doing this and risking more loss of support from the CRG etc unless he really had to.

Johnson is living his fantasy right now. Being Prime Minister is his boss level achievement unlocked, and on top of it all he's got a national crisis to demonstrate his leadership and statesmanship. Not just Brexit, but a worldwide pandemic too. He's as happy as a pig in clover.

Who are the CRG going to find to replace him that they and the party membership will agree on? The bookies are offering Sunak as favourite at 7/4 followed by Truss at 4/1. I suspect the parliamentary party will favour Sunak, but the blue rinse members have consistently given Truss a tremendously high net approval rating in party polls. But look at the ways the CRG could lose, if they call it and the leadership election goes wrong they could end up with Patel, Gove, or Raab.

Thursday is going to be the crunchpoint. If North Shropshire is the disaster that's being predicted...

(Source: www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/COVID-19-HOSPITAL-SURVEILLANCE-UPDATE_WEEK-48-2021_rev.pdf)

This chart shows the amount of time South African patients have been spending in hospital with COVID, for each of the waves--first wave, second (Delta) wave, and third (Omicron) wave.

Much shorter stays for this wave. Either patients are getting sick from Omicron but not AS sick, or a lot of people are being found to have Omicron when they are hospitalized for something else, or a mixture of the two things.

The media are now making a big point to report that one person in hospital has died with Omicron. Whilst I don't doubt that some people will end up in hospital from Omicron, I'm still believing the reports from SA (including one on LBC this morning from reporter there saying SA us 4 weeks ahead of us and almost everyone in the country is saying the UK is going unnecessarily mental over this variant), and one interview with a reporter in SA on Sky news half an hour ago also saying this variant is of very little concern and not causing people to be very ill at all in comparison with Delta.

Yet the UK I feel are scaremongering people into getting their jabs now with the reports someone has died WITH Omicron - not from. They have very carefully and consistently worded it as WITH - not from.

I may be misremembering, but was there this level of reporting with the delta variant? I mean the level of “the first person in the uk has died” sort of thing.
Was anyone expecting there not to be deaths from omicron? Even if it was milder, there’d still be some. I don’t understand the reporting as if this is a shock, surely no one heard about the new variant and thought “oh I wonder if anyone will die from it.” Is the death from omicron today more concerning than the presumably numerous deaths from delta?

It doesn't matter if it is 'milder than Delta' - it's vastly increased transmissibility and its ability to evade vaccines means that cases numbers will grow exponentially and once a large number of cases exist even a tiny proportion of people needing oxygen, hospital care, or worse case ICUs will be overwhelming.

People absolutely have been playing it down - there are multiple threads on here with people asking why the concern if it's just a mild cold. The word "mild" in this context has been hugely misunderstood by the general public. Covid has always been mild for many but absolutely far from mild for many others too and it's a numbers game at the end of the day - a small percentage of a large number is still a lot!

@Undisclosedlocation

A genuine question to those of you who are CEV. I hope not to sound insensitive but I’m struggling to understand why this virus is more of an issue than all of the others and needing of such extreme measures where none have ever been in place for you before for any other virus.

Does a common cold or the flu not also pose you similar risks? Or is it just covid?

I am CEV and up until this pandemic it had almost zero impact on my life, except having to have a pneumonia jab every 3 years.

I've been healthy, active, walked and jogged regularly, barely sick and generally been a pretty robust person.

I have perhaps been a bit more conscious of the risk of scepsis or pneumonia but honestly the last time I was at the doctor for anything other than routine stuff (e.g. smear) was years and years ago now. Maybe 10 years? Possibly even as many as 20?

Being send close to to dozen government letters about being CEV has rather come as a shock, tbh. Although I obviously am aware of my qualifying condition. Being then given the impression that if I die of covid someone will just write my death off as 'had underlying conditions' is a bit galling.