And to pre-empt the "yeah, but there's a lag between the number of active cases and hospitalisations/deaths, I crunched the numbers to track the hospitalisation rate per 1,000 active cases, (hospitalisations lagging active number of cases by 7 days) over the past 3 months (a long enough time frame to capture the UK winter.
It is very difficult to not notice the statistically meaningful drop off in number hospitalisations per active case from the time of Omicron's first reported appearance in the UK.
In the first months of winter the hospitalisation rate fluctuated between 8 and 9.5 per 1,000 active cases.
But since omicron's arrival (circa 27 November), the hospitalisation rate is clearly on a downward trend:
View attachment 3935183[Sources: Worldometer and European CDC
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/...pital?time=earliest..latest&country=~GBR]Two points are worth stressing here:
1. Recall that the hospitalisation numbers are lagged against the active case numbers by 7 days because, as we know, the patients that do present at hospitals with Covid don't do so on the same day as they are recorded as a Covid case
2. Omicron will have formed a mere minority all of the total number of active cases in the UK over the period represented in the above graph, and yet despite that, it appears to already be having an impact on reducing the hospitalisation rates. So once omicron becomes the dominant strain over coming months, it is not unreasonable to expect that the hospitalisation rates are likely to continue to fall.
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