While the World health Organisation reported no deaths from omicron by late on Friday, it continues to stress it could take weeks to determine whether this variant causes more severe illness and how effective vaccines and other treatments are against it.
The South African report looked at the features of people with COVID-19 admitted to two major hospitals in the heart of the district of Pretoria which is the epicentre of the outbreak in the province of Gauteng.It looked at the 166 patients admitted between November 14 and 29. Then it took a snapshot of the clinical profile of 42 patients in the COVID-19 wards at the hospitals on December 2.
It found most hospital admissions were for diagnoses unrelated to COVID-19 and said positivity was an incidental finding, largely driven by hospital policy to test all patients requiring admission.
The snapshot of 42 patients revealed 29 were not oxygen-dependent. These patients were doing well on room air and had no respiratory symptoms. “These are the patients that we would call ‘incidental COVID admissions’, having had another medical or surgical reason for admission,” the report says.
