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UK tests a lot more than south africa who likely only have tests available for the more severe cases compared to uk where some ppl are testing themselves a lot.
Uk tests so far around 400 million. South africa at 21 million. Population slightly larger in uk but around 10% or so. Data could imply that uk have a lot more ppl infected which is likely true but much more likely that South africa do not have the means to test ppl unless they are severly infected. Hence the rather high admissions rate.
So its not a very meaningful statistic. But still even at 5 or 10 % of that its not a great situation either
badboybjorn-
Absolutely, on all counts. Gauteng ran out of free PCR tests every day...meaning you either didn't get tested or had to pay $50 to a private hospital. A whole lot of people in SA do not have any access to healthcare too, which might explain their high excess deaths recently. This is why i've been such an insufferable bore/pedant when it comes to pointing to SA so much. So many reasons you can't draw parallels.
At that point you start looking towards Denmark, who test at a similar rate to us and are seeing roughly 1% admission rate (and growing a bit) at the moment. Although I have a feeling the UK and Denmark aren't particularly similar public health wise either.
Various epidemiologists in the UK have said that they are guessing a UK rate of 1% give or take but they are very much guesses.
1% of 145k cases is 1450 admissions per day. The UK gov have been privately working to the theory that if admissions stay below 1,000, everything is ticketyboo. And the higher you go above 1k, the worse the impact.
Edit: New slice of admissions data just arrived. In England on the 28th, 2,082 people were admitted to hospital with a Covid diagnosis, of those 1,593 people had Covid as their primary reason for admission.
Stonehedge
Our record number of cases by specimen date is about 145k. 4.9% of 145k is 7,105.
7,105 admissions per day into the NHS would be a disaster. I'm not saying that will happen, it most likely will not for a lot of reasons...better access to primary healthcare, vaccinations etc etc. That said, we have more long term conditions, waning booter effifacy in the oldest populations and an older population overall so there are still a lot of unknowns.
However, hopefully this serves as a good example of why the simplistic narrative that "omicron is mild" based on experiences in SA, doesn't really provide much factual encouragement for the ladies and gents working in our hospitals. Even if we have half the admission rate of Gauteng, it could still be a breaking point situation imho.