Omicron, Cold symptoms

a warm welcome to today's talk saturday the 18th of december now it looks like the main features of omicron infection in the uk so far are most commonly a runny nose second a headache thirdly fatigue which can be mild or quite severe a varying presentation of fatigue sneezing and a sore throat they are the symptoms that have been identified so far as the most likely uh presenting symptoms in those are in that order for omicron infection in the uk that's in the uk situation now more on this in a minute but let's go on to some orientation slides first of all because there's some pretty interesting things unfolding actually at the moment a new daily confirmed covered 19 cases now denmark is remarkably high for new cases but of course what we have to remember is denmark has the best sequencing capacity in the world by far so it's not surprising that they're picking up more cases so denmark was here picking up a lot of new cases then united kingdom ireland united states now is this just the start of the upward deflection that we're seeing in the united states data indicating the start of omicron the answer to that question is uh probably from what we know probably it looks like the omicron surge is just about to start in the united states as we speak uh canada uh upward trend as well japan uh thankfully still um bumping along at the zero mark which is which is great news and also fascinating number of uh covered 19 patients in hospital per million so the united states still high denmark canada relatively lower united kingdom and ireland comparable and the fact that the hospitalizations have been going up in denmark but nothing like in proportion to the increase in testing indicating that they're picking up a lot more cases than most other countries are so that's the hospitalization per million at the moment and we just i've just heard actually that in the uk in all of the uk at the moment there are 65 the latest data is showing 6565 patients in all the hospitals in the uk with omicron so very low hospitalizations so far i know how early it is so uh that's the hospitalizations uh now this is the south africa data so that was the original wave back in what august um well what's that that's well that's back way back way back in 2020 isn't it sort of summer 2020 or our summer uh this was their um beta wave what we call the south africa variant at the time this was their delta wave so succinct isn't it wild type wave beta wave delta wave and now with the omicron wave the numbers are clearly uh at a record higher than they have ever been for the numbers but going on weekly admissions to hospital now they are going up clearly going up but not as quickly as we would have expected there's a bit of a delay in hospitalization increase in south africa hopefully because the overall number is going to be small now this is the new daily confirmed death now again we know there's a lag in deaths but we can clearly see there the wild type wave the south africa beta variant wave and the delta wave and uh here we see the death rate at the moment now it will probably increase somewhat but we're hoping not very much at all but that's where we are as of uh saturday the 18th of december as i've said now here's the ward occupancy that we've been looking at so there's 8 000 people in hospital in south africa at the moment these are 8 000 people in hospital in south africa who have been positively diagnosed with omicron who are also in hospital many of whom are in hospital for other reasons other than omicron infection they are incidental findings in fact we believe that applies to the majority so basically 8 000 people um the these ones are in icu 528 remember this is a population of 60 million um high care and the general ward and the patients that are requiring oxygen so basically 8 000 people in hospital diagnosed with omicron 202 are currently ventilated this is bad but for a whole country it's very very very small and 1112 patients requiring oxygen in the south africa situation at the moment so very very low numbers so far now i've got a report directly from the hospital situation in south africa so i want to share that now um this is from claire who's in south africa the medical people i interact with at the hospital are far more optimistic than i've seen them since this all began last april last year good that sounds great nobody wants to tempt fate or speak too loudly just yet but it's like walking on eggshells at the moment now what claire means here is for the scientific professions of medicine nursing pathology radiology all this kind of thing hospital workers are a surprisingly superstitious lot in my experience so if you walk in and you say oh it's a bit quiet today isn't it they'll say oh don't say that word so that i think that's what she means that's just that just reflects the sort of healthcare culture so we don't want to talk too soon but there's this feeling of quiet optimism in south africa and actually claire is in gautang the the epicenter of the the outbreak uh but this is now this is gao tang again there are open beds uh they're not filling up just yet let's hope it stays that way in fact there are two more beds now than last weekend so uh direct quotes there from um south africa and they're well into they're four weeks into this now so this is this is really starting to look encouraging for the south african situation i know there's limits on how much we can extrapolate that to the uk situation to the canada situation to the australian situation to the united states situation but it's still um pretty good news it has to be said now let's counteract that with um this who's that dr felchi someone called anthony fauci um he said uh when you have a larger number of people getting infected the total amount of hospitalizations is going to be more that's just simple math or as we would say in the uk simple maths so basically this is the caution uh dr fouchy is saying that there's going to be one heck of a lot of people infected with this if it's even only a small proportion we could be in for issues in the united states now let's look at the symptoms now omicron and cold-like symptoms rapidly taking over in london so london is the epicenter in the uk in fact i think we'll just look at tim spector's data here the covered symptom tracker data just for further orientation on this now now these are um these are people that are doubly vaccinated who become new cases amongst doubly vaccinated people these are symptomatic cases so lots of doubly vaccinated people are symptomatic this is the total number of cases uh here the total number of people symptomatic so we do see that uh people who are doubly vaccinated are still getting clinical features quite quite extensively nearly always the clinical features are mild and nearly always the shorter lived they're less likely to result in severe illness hospitalizations and death but they still are symptomatic um now this is incidents by age group so the particularly notable thing here the younger age group fairly flat in terms of overall incidence because this is always about a week out of date this is up to the 11th of december i think so this is always a bit out of date what we do see though is this rapid increase in 18 to 35 year olds and this has actually been confirmed by more recent data a reduction in the older age group who tend to socialize less but are also highly vaccinated and the older age group thankfully numbers remaining fairly low this is the incidence in london and as we see even as of the 11th of december cases in london were going up quite dramatically the r value now has probably about gone up from 1.1 to probably about three four some people say even some people say even five um between three and five at the moment so massive increase between the 11th and now but this is this show the early part of that trend um so here here again we see the cases in different parts of england so this is wales fairly high here but what we need to notice is this orange line here so we see that this orange line as is going up or was going up pretty steeply and this of course is the london line because that's where omicron's taken hold in england first make no mistakes other parts of the uk will be following on in the next few days in the next few days um but that is the situation as of the 11th so i thought that was uh quite interesting now the concern concern here is long covered now let me show you this uh new cases have long covered every day it's gonna last for more than 12 weeks so we see nearly one and a half thousand people a day are going to develop long covered and we know this from the percentages of people that do develop this um what we don't know is if this is more likely with omicron less likely with omicron equally likely with omicron equally likely with omicron after vaccination equally likely or more likely or less likely with omicron without vaccination we don't know any of that so that is a concern the long coverage situation is a concern and we simply have no idea at the moment and we probably won't know that for of course takes long coverage it takes a long time to present of course obviously um right symptoms uh data up to the 11th of december coverage symptom tracker data tim spector zoe king's college london data that we follow closely we just looked at and people at least two doses in the uk so there's uh currently and this was as of the week up to the 11th of december um 27 000 new daily symptomatic cases in people with at least two doses of vaccine so already before i'm and this is this is before omicron's huge we're seeing a lot of breakthrough infections before omicron was big now omicron is big we're going to see even more breakthrough infections that is well we know that we now know that an increase of six percent from the week before and it was twenty five thousand four hundred and eleven london's currently seeing a rapid rise in positive cases remember this is as early as the 11th of december so this is the start of the omicron wave in london that's been going on now for what about uh about 10 days um driven by omikron no question about that prevalence in the uk 1 in 57 of the week up to the 11th of december as we said predicted long covered um what 1 418 people a day a day will go on to experience symptoms for more than 12 weeks this is a big dent out of people's lives it's a big dent out of the economy it's a big dent out of the out of the workforce how that's going to be with omicron we simply have no idea if i said anything it would be a pure 100 100 yes so i'm not going to say anything we simply don't know omicron symptoms initial analysis of symptoms data from positive cases in london so looking where the data is to compare delta anomicron symptoms london data was selected from a week in october this is quite clever so of course this week in october was all essentially all delta that was the delta week now this most recent week that they have up to the 10th of december this is going to be largely delta but partly omicron so at this time it would be a guess but i'd say there's about 20 percent of cases omicron in london at that time we now know it's much the majority of cases of course um so the comparing a week that was all delta with a week that was delta and omicron so that's the comparison so that's that's the omicron zero week being compared with the omicron around 20 week the initial analysis found no clear difference in the early symptoms three days after test between delta and omega so three days after test typically someone's going to get symptoms maybe get tested the day after so you're probably looking about four days four or five days uh symptomatic into the symptomatic period and um initial analysis found no clear difference in the early symptoms interesting and it has to be said slightly different from south africa now let's just look at that because there's probably quite a bit of relevance here um top five zoe reported uh symptoms so so this is this is the early london data right most common runny nose second most common headache third most common fatigue sometimes the fatigue was bad sometimes it was mild fourth most common feature sneezing fifth most common feature sore throat the implication is obvious if you have any of these and you've had colds in the past you're going to think it's a cold but it may well not be it may be a omicron cold need to get tested now slight difference in the presentation in south africa we looked at this before so in south africa blocked or running nose check that's the same headache check that's the same tiredness check that's the same now london in the uk is described as a sore throat in south africa it's described as a scratchy or sore throat so i think that's the same the big difference is um in the uk data fatigue is a much more prominent feature although we know there was fatigue in the south africa data but the body aches were a prominent feature in south africa whereas that doesn't seem to be such a feature in the london data now why is this could it be that um body aches are more likely to break through as a symptom in people that have had previous actual um sarcoidovirus to infection because we know that's where the majority of the immunity comes from in south africa whereas maybe the vaccine because we know the majority of immunity in the uk comes from vaccination the vaccine provides more protectiveness against body aches that could be that could be the case so it could be the difference in the nature of immunity but as far as the uk is looking and i've no reason to suspect this will be any different in the united states or europa anywhere else this is in most people presenting as a cold mild and self-limiting in the vast majority of cases so there you go running nose headache fatigue sneezing sore throat think is this omicron it could well be and test and behave accordingly essentially the same as a south africa data with that bit of difference now i hesitate to give you the official nhs sir nhs symptoms because it's just becoming a national embarrassment to be quite honest it is so out of date now to be fair i did take this off the website about 25 minutes ago so it could they could have updated it i took this off the website just before we came to do this video so they could have updated it in that time i mean they haven't in the last 18 months but they could have done nhs official symptoms a high temperature a new continuous cough loss change in your sense of smell or taste i mean this is just 18 months out of date what is the nhs playing at here it's just embarrassing now it can present like this but we know from contemporary data and we like to be up to date that that's what we get from the zoe symptom tracker data that's what we've got from the clinicians on the ground in south africa this is what we continue to get from the nhs in the uk so yes it could present at a high temperature yes it could present as a new continuous cough yes there could be a loss of the change of sense of taste or smell but normally not normally the vast majority we believe are these features here why on earth these features have not got through to the nhs website is a mystery to me one of uh several mysteries about the official response to this pandemic it has to be said by getting back to tim spector omicron is said to be the dominant strain in the uk by christmas of course uh and in the new year cases could hit a peak higher than anything we've seen before inevitable um tim is being cautious here it is inevitable that this will be the case in my view um hopefully people now recognize the cold-like symptoms which appear to be the predominant features of omicron absolutely let's hope they do despite the lack of help from the official government website ahead of christmas if people want to get together and keep vulnerable family and my family family members safe so this is the key thing here vulnerable family members older people in the family uh immuno compromised people in the family um these are the people we need to think about protecting over the holiday period tim spector says i'd recommend limiting social contacts in the run-up to christmas uh he's not saying don't have your christmas dinner just say don't go nuts in the run-up to christmas and doing a few lateral flow tests just before big family gatherings especially if there's vulnerable people present so that makes perfect sense now i have got a report from uh imperial college london but i think we'll leave that for now because i don't want to dilute the impact of that because this is the really important thing that we need to uh get across this one is out of date and we need to have a high index of suspicion for this one which of course we're going to post in the comments as we always do with the references okay i think that's what we want to do for now um let's just have a look at let's just have a look at one of liz's graphics let's have a look at one of these graphics here we did these graphics with this oh a long long time ago um on vitamin d are you getting enough vitamin d we're asking that question darker coloured skin people make less vitamin d in exposed to the sunshine but we don't get any sunshine anyway in the uk at the moment so uh something to bear in mind thank you for watching and optimize your immune system as best as you can thank you

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 1,214,778

Keywords: physiology, nursing, NCLEX, health, disease, biology, medicine, nurse education, medical education, pathophysiology, campbell, human biology, human body

Id: y1nqQOn6Rbc

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LordHughRAdumbass]

Maybe we should stop posting this guy.

Check out all the brigading from shill bots that this generated!

This guy is chill alright. Far too chill.

Those are the symptoms of HIV-1 infection he's describing there.

What I'm scared of is that this variant is basically an HIV-1/S⚠RS-GoF-2 chimera. My fear is that we could be looking at an airborne version of HIV-1 and celebrating it prematurely as "the end of the pαndεmic" when it's actually the start of a living nightmare.

[u/Flashy_Honeydew_1290]

You are legend! When all world is in panic mode Dr. Campbell is chill and with clear facts.

[u/Weekly-Ad-6813]

Dr John, the lifeboat of reason and common sense on the sea of hysteria and gloom.

[u/NoFee1072]

Thanks so much John. I think I speak for everyone when i say that we appreciate the unbiased and detailed explanations which are such a contrast to the fear mongering in mainstream media.

[u/One-Event3304]

I literally was falling off my chair with laughter when you picked on "a Dr. Fauci" and stressed the difference in spelling "math(s)".

Thanks so much for being one of the representatives of British humo(u)r and of course for your outstanding educational work, John!

[u/ConnectionSoggy3465]

Dr. John, I saw an interesting article yesterday here in the US (I'm so sorry, I can't remember which news outlet)...sewage analysis in Orlando, Fl (of course, home of Disney World and Universal theme parks) showed Omicron as the dominant variant in that area. COVID hospitalizations in that area currently are all Delta-related. This hopefully will continue and confirms your thinking, I believe! Thank you for your videos!

[u/Attention-Scum]

Just a cold?

65 Omicron patients in hospital in UK.