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The head of NHS providers said yesterday that various trusts are reporting mostly incidental Covid cases. This is good news. Still too early to know if the NHS will cope though because as you say, there is a burden attached to these cases.
The main reason why epidemiologists aren't celebrating this yet is that we don't know what Omicron does to older populations yet. Fingers crossed its mild for them too.
Stonehedge
@Ramsaye
There was someone on the UK news today warning against reading too much into the hospitalisation rates as these include both the people in hospital because of covid and people in hospital who happen to have covid. The latter being in hospital for other reasons, being asymptomatic and largely unaware they had covid until the hospital admissions tests. The numbers in hospital will always go up at least in line with infection rates in the community if you assume people who happen to have covid but are unaware of the illness also do normal hospitalising things like break a leg or have other medical conditions.
They went in to say that this does create a disproportionate burden though as it means areas such as renal wards need to have separate sections with all the infection control measures you’d expect for patients who also happen to have covid but are not in hospital because of covid.