According to data from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, more than 1 million cases of COVID-19 were recorded in the United States on January 3, because the Omicron variant spread at a very rapid rate.
Covid-19 hospitalization rates have remained relatively stable in the face of unprecedented infections caused by the Omicron variant, and public health officials are now openly talking about abandoning the daily case count, which to date has been a key database for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Just before the new year arrives, Robert Strang, a top physician in Canada's Nova Scotia, said that under Omicron's leadership, they would be paying more attention to the "severity" of the wave than to its raw data.
"We are moving to focus more on hospitalization data," Dr. Strong said at a dec. 28 briefing.
In Ontario, the province's chief health officer, Kieran Moore, said last week that he was keeping a close eye on hospitalizations rather than case counts to gauge the severity of the Omicron wave.
This view is made even clearer in KFL&A Public Health, a health district around Kingston, Ontario. At a media briefing last week, Dr Piotr Oglaza, the region's health care officer, said the number of cases would "no longer truly reflect" the impact of COVID-19.
Oglaza said: "I believe that we are in a stage of widespread dissemination in the community, and hospitalization or admission to the ICU is a key indicator of how big the impact of the Ormi Kerong variant is." ”
This view has also become mainstream among U.S. public health leaders. Anthony Fauci, the White House's chief medical adviser, told ABC News this week: "It is more important to focus on hospitalizations than the total number of cases." ”
White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci: "It is more important to focus on the number of hospitalizations than the total number of cases. ”
It's been more than a month since the first discovery of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in South Africa. On Tuesday, a World Health Organization official said they may be witnessing a "decoupling" between case rates and severe illness.
In previous WAVES OF COVID-19, the surge in cases was often a reliable indicator that the corresponding deaths and hospitalizations would surge within a few days.
But Abdi Mahamud, WHO's event manager, said Omicron appeared to be bucking the trend, largely because of where it happened.
"We're seeing more and more studies pointing out that Omicron is infecting the upper body," Mahmoud said. The result is that Omicron largely allows patients to develop cold-like symptoms, such as coughing and sore throat, without producing severe pneumonia that previously mutated.
In Canada, early data do show that a virus has an unprecedented capacity to infect without producing the incidence of severe diseases seen in previous waves.
At this time last year, an average of 50 people died every day in Quebec from COVID-19. In all the WAVES OF COVID-19 prior to Quebec, the number of cases per day surged no more than about 2,500. Under Omicron's leadership, the number of new infections per day has exceeded 3,000 since mid-December. On Tuesday, the province hit an all-time high of 14,494 people, but the reported death toll was relatively low at 21.
In Ontario, the rate of new daily cases has reached an all-time high since before Christmas. Still, the number of people in the ICU increased by about 100 compared to what was happening before the Omicron surge. As of January 4, there were 263 adults in the ICU due to COVID-19, compared to 167 on December 6.
What's more, more and more hospitalized patients are those who happen to be people living with COVID-19, rather than those admitted to hospital due to complications of COVID-19.
In a December 30 briefing, Kieran Moore said a hospital in Ontario estimated that as many as 50 percent of COVID-19 patients were "accidental." That is, the patient is admitted to the hospital for another disease and the routine test result for COVID-19 is positive.
"Incidental" infections are closely monitored in U.S. jurisdictions, and the incidence is even higher. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services reported that about two-thirds of COVID-19 patients were admitted to hospital for illnesses other than coronavirus.