Omicron predictions

a warm welcome to today's talk it's friday the 17th of december now as we predicted um a couple of weeks ago now omicron is going round the world and we still believe we are all going to be exposed to it just to give you an example of that the r value in the uk now is between three and five so reproductive value of between three and five in the uk at the moment this is escalating very steeply still exponentially now before we look at the uk and some other areas of the world to look at where we're going to go on this let's just look at some orientation slides first of all so um here we have uh this is the new confirmed cases so um japan wonderful pandemic's gone away uh new zealand fairly low australia going up now now i'm not fully up to date with the omicron situation in australia but we do know that there is some now so i'm afraid we can expect the australian figures to go up um canada going up already south africa quite a steep increase but we know that the actual cases in south africa are way higher than this these are the officially reported diagnose cases the real number is real much higher we'll be getting a report from a doctor in south africa in a minute um united states still fairly high with delta no sign of the omicron surge in the united states but it will come germany again omicron not really taken hold there but some of the measures bringing delta down a bit ireland and uh the united kingdom both surging ahead both uh powered by omicron so um that's the cases now i just want to give a bit of orientation here to uh europe your europe as a whole again new newly diagnosed cases or um officially diagnosed cases rather denmark omicron surge a very high very high number of cases in denmark switzerland next united kingdom norway island so all of these high countries these are all omicron surges looks like omicron is starting to take hold in france as well germany spain portugal united states lower omicron yet to take a grip in those countries remember that's purely the number of uh cases diagnosed so here we see the official sort of omicron figures now these are probably about a week out of date now the official figures the the real numbers are much higher than this in terms of omicron in quite a few of these countries but south africa we notice it's basically all omicron now australia we've got 11 percent there um canada 9.6 japan even although there's essentially no cases in japan some of them are omicron so i think that's fairly definitively we can say that we will start to see japan featuring on that graph let's hope we don't get hospitalizations and deaths but in terms of cases the omicron will be spreading around japan the same as everywhere else it's inconceivable really that it won't um but let's let let's wait and see we this pandemic sometimes surprises us keep going to the wrong screen there we go united kingdom well we know that the cases in the united kingdom are much higher than that at least 20 30 now germany island we know they're much higher than that um new zealand i don't know um so that's that's roughly where around a week ago with uh variants uh weekly new hospital admissions per million now this is interesting so we do see an increase in hospitalizations in south africa we do see that but as we've said omicron is everywhere in south africa now or virtu well it's it's spreading there very very rapidly still germany island united kingdom south africa united states um new hospital admissions remained fairly high in the united states largely the largely the northern states at the moment driving that but still pretty high overall but south africa encouragingly low new daily confirmed deaths so south africa and they do they did they do register the deaths accurately in south africa very low numbers of deaths and we're getting on for four weeks into the omicron surge now in south africa but still a very low number of deaths so this is remarkably uh reassuring so far um ireland united kingdom deaths slightly going down the united kingdom united states the deaths have stayed high and uh again um delta driven deaths in germany relatively high despite exceptionally good health care facilities in germany share the population fully vaccinated well i think we can see it clear group here of these countries and another grouping here of uh well group on its own south african of course other african countries would be uh below that more discussion on that in a minute it is quite relevant so um that sort of orientation as to where we are at the moment now let's let's look at some detail now for the united kingdom um so as we said the r value is three to five now this was the case is yesterday they're up here up there i don't know how well you can see that but that that's the line up there so there we are now and of course when the figures come out in about three hours time almost certainly we're going to be up here because the testing in the uk is still pretty good not doubling but but going up she starts fairly fairly sharply it's not doubling every two or three days but of course these are official these are official figures the real number of infections we know is way way higher so that is definitely going up and it will be higher than it's ever been before in the entire pandemic in terms of cases now this is another interesting knock-on effect or problematic knock-on effect so guys and thomas's st thomas's hospital trust one of the biggest trusts in london 10 of the staff are currently off with with copped mostly omicron having to self-isolate for 10 days 10 of staff and that's only going to go up this is going to be a big problem national grid grocery restores transport hospitals police all of these depend on people being able to go to work chris whittake medical officer omicron wave going to peak very quickly his words probably within just a a week or two so within we actually this this pandemic's kind of coming to a head now with it within a week or two we're going to know um how many hospitalizations and deaths on micron is going to bring about i believe it's going to be remarkably low in vaccinated countries but we we wait for that but what we do know is that people are going to develop massive amounts of immunity so as i'm speaking now all over the uk and ireland for example where there's high levels of omicron there's a massive amount of immunity being developed as as we speak could this signal the end of the pandemic to all intents and purposes that that is that is possible we're coming to a head now and and i'm i'm hopeful that it's not going to be expensive in terms of hospitalizations and deaths um so infections in the uk doubling every two to three days about 2.4 is probably the best estimate nhs reduction in supply that is a lot of the staff are off sick and increasing demand all at the same time and more records could be broken so more people will need to go to hospital as more and more workers are off sick so that is a problem how is that going to pan out over the next few weeks we really don't know yet but chris we just says more records will be broken so let's just have a look at the uh the official site for the uk that is here so i've put i plugged the link to this of course them immense amount of information there testing cases healthcare vaccinations data all really readily available and we see that huge increase so that was the day before and that was yesterday and as i say that will be going much higher they're gonna have to change the scale on the graphic pretty soon just look at the coverage symptoms study app here as well um 88 000 new cases in the uk reporting symptomatic coverage but today the number of people actually getting on mccron must be at least quarter of a million at least that by now it was 200 000 two days ago so it could be it could be going on for three four hundred thousand now and yet only 88 000 projected to be symptomatic in the country so looks like we are seeing quite a lot of people either incubating omicron who have not yet become symptomatic pre-symptomatic people or people that are indeed thankfully asymptomatic and we do know that people have been boosted for example have got about a 70 chance of being asymptomatic so that's really quite uh quite encouraging at the moment um so that that was daily cases this is this is the prevalence 1.72 million up there london is a big concentration at the moment as we'll see and the the prevalence here symptomatic cases remember um still they've got it's got a way to go but we are seeing a lot of asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic uh omicron infections so that is i i'm classifying that as good news at the moment um now chris whittie's saying that we've got omicron as well as delta at the moment so what he's saying is number of omicron infections is rising very fast of course very fast but the delta cases are flat so what chris which the chief medical officer is saying here is that we actually have two pandemics at the moment we have the delta one which is staying flat and we have the omicron one which is exponentially uh increasing now this is not this is not what we saw in south africa what we've seen in south africa is omikron replacing delta so i am confident that the delta cases are going to go down as the omicron cases increase over time we're just not seeing it yet and as the omicron cases which are causing minimal symptoms we hope go up the delta variant which is causing nasty symptoms sometimes and hospitalization goes down i i'm i think that could be a hopeful combination and i would hope that even though there's lots of omicron cases this is going to be balanced out in terms of hospitalization in terms of decreased delta but it's not happening yet the data is shown that delta is still with us that we have two pandemics at the same time delta is not going away but being built on according to the current data but i i do predict in the next few days that will change and the omicron will start displacing the delta as it did in south africa and that could have very good implications for hospitalizations and people getting sick it really is would be immensely surprising if it didn't displace it the same system in south africa that would be immensely surprising so i'm predicting that delta is going to reduce pretty soon days to a week or two doubling if doubling time is every three days i'm making that assumption doubling times every three days christmas eve there'll be uh another 462 000 cases in the day that'll be two million people testing positive and the people that test positive have to self-isolate for ten days so two million people let's say a million of those are in the workforce you don't need me to spell out how significant this is to the work to the whole running of the logistics of the whole country um and their contacts may also be symptomatic now of course the contacts will sometimes be tested sometimes not be tested but we're expecting testing capacity big though it is to be exceeded so in the uk there's going to be so many omicron cases testing capacity will be exceeded now at the moment we can do about 800 000 pcr tests today that that's going to bunk up by about another 100 150 000 but it still could be uh exceeded because we could be going for a million new infections a day professor andrew heywood sage member outbreak spreading faster than tess can keep up and he's got a useful analogy here if you think about getting a year's worth of rain in a month then you're gonna get flooded and potentially severe flooding no matter how much you've shored up your defenses he says but what we could say is that the drainage has been improved to extend the analogy if delta cases are going down because it's the delta cases that are making people sick we believe mostly so as the omicron displaces delta this could increase the drainage even though the rainfall is going to be higher to use that analogy now professor david spiegel holds a very interesting statistician he was the chair for the public understanding of risk i think for a while i'm not sure if he still holds that though i'm sure he'll correct me if he's so someone knows um but very interesting statistician comes up with some fascinating stuff um reduced socialization will slow down the spread so in other words what he's saying is as more and more people become aware aware of this people will socialize less and it's patient or people behavior of course that's the main factor in perpetuating the whole issue if this keeps doubling every two days you get to remember 11 million on christmas day and the entire country on new year's eve so he's basically saying that's not feasible um but it's probably not going to be long after that probably not going to be long after that because this is so contagious so he says this is not sensible but professor spiegelhalter does say millions of people are going to catch this over the next few weeks and months that that we know we know that's going to happen so no ambiguity this is go this happening as we've been predicting for some weeks uh it could be considerably better than last winter it could be worse um not particularly helpful uh there but uh technically accurate i'm hopeful it's going to be better but of course we don't know yet now that was the zoe symptom tracker data that we saw there uh which do do check this website out all sorts of fascinating news on it and of course do do fill it in for yourself you know news and research there for example always interesting things from tim spector's team to uh to read up on there we see omicron and code-like symptoms rapidly taking over in london wow so um yeah you have to you have to run fast to keep up with this pandemic but i think we're getting the main points across now going on to the lunar school of hydrogen and tropical medicine prediction and i think a lot of the government the government haven't said this but it seems a lot of the government's thinking and planning is based on this and it is fairly well i think it's fairly pessimistic so what what they're saying here is well um they're saying that here's the this is the worst case scenario here in terms of uh potential admissions based on immune evasion and vaccine effectiveness so they're looking over six thousand emissions a day by into january that's their worst case uh prediction their best case prediction is um down here with hospitalizations peaking at a much more manageable 2000 per day now this is leaving a heck of a lot of unknown ground in between that we simply don't know and there's no reason why figures shouldn't be comparable for the united states and other areas so that's the 16th of jan we're now on the 17th of december so i guess we're about there so um it looks like we're not reaching the uh the pessimistic scenario at the moment but that's what a lot of the government planning seems to be on but let's look at actual data this is up to date and yesterday of course so this is people in hospital which is there so we see it's not going up at the moment um united kingdom so that this is actually with a number one so in hospital at the moment seven thousand five hundred and seventy nine so seven and a half thousand people uh in hospital at the moment with covered and just remember that number because that's going to be quite interesting and relevant in a minute now london there are more cases of covered uh of omicron in in london london does seem to be leading the way unfortunately on this um as we've just seen from tim spector's uh tantally tantalizing article there that we'll have to read london in hospital data so we do see that the london hospital data has gone up somewhat and this is going to be the key indicator for the uk so we're going to know what's going to happen in the rest of the united kingdom by what's happening in london it's going to happen in london first is it already start happening in london or is that just a bit of a blip because it's that time of year anyway we really don't know that yet but we're going to keep an eye on that because that's going to be a useful indicator just to south africa is a useful indicator and here we have the numbers 199 emissions on the 14th of december the information for the 15th of december should be in in about three or four hours uh time now of course it's really important that we follow what's going on in south africa so let's do that and remember there were seven and a half thousand people we said in hospital in the uk at the moment now south africa where omicron is now rampant we see that the hospitalizations in south africa are the same and the populations are similar i mean roughly the population in south africa is 60 million the population in the uk is about 66 million now i think so comparable populations and as we speak now the same number of people in hospital despite the fact that south africa is three weeks ahead of us in terms of omicron development so this does does this mean that we'll have the same number of patients in hospital now in three weeks time well if we follow the south africa trend that that could that could well be what is uh what is happening um intensive care 509 high care 564 patients on the ordinary ward 6541 so that's the south africa situation now and this is the level of intervention that they're receiving in south africa so um currently ventilated 195 for the whole country remember and these those requiring oxygen have gone up to nearly 1300 so still a relatively small proportion of the entire population of south africa that's that's the proportion of 60 million people who are both in hospital and testing positive for covid and being oxygenated but some of those are being oxygenated or a good proportion of those are being oxygenated for reasons other than covered as the primary pathology so i think this puts it in optimistic in an optimistic context i would i would hope so south africa now this is directly from a doctor in south africa this morning um i don't know if i can use his name or not i'll have to ask him that so i won't use it for now um so what we see in south africa cases are rising steeply in all provinces now now how tang they seem to have leveled off will be going down a little bit but in all the other provinces they are scooting up um cases in the fourth wave are higher than previous peaks in all previous waves so this is the highest number of new infections in south africa ever in the entire pandemic of new infections but as we saw hospitalizations currently seven and a half thousand relatively low hospitalizations and deaths are not currently following this trend remember this is from a doctor in south africa are still relatively low most admissions to hospital are still for unvaccinated people that's interesting mostly still unvaccinated people in hospital pfizer boosters have been approved and can be given six months after full vaccination and the first of those will go through in december so be six months for the first people in december not cutting it to three months as we have done in the united kingdom and we see the data for south africa here it's all there available at least it would if the when they update the website but trust me i did get that to get my data directly from the website when it was fully uh working so that is uh information from the those numbers from the department of health in south africa but interesting to see that perspective from a doctor on the ground in south africa now black dog writes in this um i'm living in south africa the massive our population population live in townships are and vaccinated so the majority are unvaccinated especially in the townships uh there is no mass of any social distancing ever since the pandemic started so many people in the townships have basically not been following a lot of regulations although they were compulsory lockdowns at the early stage the elephant in the room has been ignored we're only 25 to have to wait and see what the elephant is we're only 25 to 30 fully vaccinated true very low vaccination full vaccination rates 16 seater minibus taxes commuting the masses of people daily no mask social distancing 16 people all crammed in a minibus guaranteed spread hospitalizations and deaths are lower than a year ago during their earlier beta wave i think it was a year ago in pandemic natural immunity this is the elephant in the room natural immunity needs to come back to the discussion and needs to stop being downplayed and disregarded by the mainstream media is a black dog's opinion which is a interesting view and uh in south africa seems to have some merit to be fair south africa mostly 72 percent i think of people have uh natural antibodies to the infection so high level of natural immunity in south africa but that professor from south africa yesterday clearly saying that previous infection is protective against severe disease in omicron clearly saying that vaccination is protective against severe disease in omicron so both conferring good levels of protection that's why i remain optimistic about the uk and indeed the united states although vaccination rates in the states are slightly lower than the uk um as we've seen omicron is going through ireland despite the high vaccination rates because people can catch it just hopefully not many get sick globally world health organization omicron is spreading across the globe at a globe at an unprecedented rate of course w.h.o dr ted ross surely we've learned by now that we underestimate this virus at our peril okay fair enough even if omicron does cause less severe disease the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems so we still don't know for sure now just to finish today um oh that's good it looks like the uk government's responded to the vitamin d deficiency so we know that huge numbers of people uh in the uk are deficient in vitamin d and it looks like the government's responded so let's see what the government have said on this now free vitamin d supplements for people at high risk from coronavis 19 oh service closed oh okay right fair enough so the government response during a period of massively escalating omicron is to [Music] close the service for free vitamin d despite the fact that we know that people that are low on vitamin d are immunocompromised if you understand that do let me know because i sure as heck don't it is quite inexplicable quite inexplicable there you go that's the response of the uh the uk government answers in the comments if you understand that one please if you're from the government let me know because i don't understand it and i i don't think any people watching this understand it government so please do inform us please do inform us okay so there we go case is massively escalating you are going to be exposed to omicron um virtually if you're watching this video i think it's fair to say you're going to be exposed to omicron at some point in the next days weeks or a month or two have your immune system as optimized as you can and thank you for watching

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 926,129

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

Id: _T6C-2FNy8I

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LordHughRAdumbass]

The new report (Report 49) from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant. This implies that the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%.

That's why they call it an "escape variant". This is not the end of the pαndεmic, it is just a new invasion force on a new front. And by no means the last one, either.