Omicron UK surge

my warm welcome to today's talk wednesday the 15th of december now in the united kingdom at the moment we're getting about 200 000 new omicron uh infections per day by the end of the month this is going to be around a million new infections per day this is a very good thing and they're just going to generate huge amounts of immunity really quickly this is a very bad thing in that a portion of these people we believe a very small proportion but a proportion are going to get ill it's also bad in this is going to have a massive impact on public services as many people are isolated because they're positive if a million new people are getting infected per day by the end of the month important to remember that where the united kingdom is now the united states will be in three or four weeks so by the end of january it's very likely there'll be two or three million new omicron infections per day in the united states so if you're in the states do bear that in mind now let's look at the live data we have at the moment this is the tim spector zoe symptom tracker data which of course is put up daily i update mine every day as i'm sure many of you do 1.46 million people are currently predicted to have symptomatic covered in the uk so let's make a note of that 1.46 million people who probably have uh symptomatic disease at the moment because it's going to be important when we look at the proportion of hospitalizations the number of new cases 85 000 per day and already we see um 85 000 people this this is the extrapolated figure for the whole of the uk 85 000 people with symptomatic covered new per day but we know there's over now 200 000 new cases so we see that the majority of cases already we can see are not symptomatic so more than half of the cases appear to be asymptomatic already we can say that from provisional data with the omicron infection so i just made a note of that 1.46 million because we want to check on that when we come to um when we come to look at hospitalizations this is the data we're looking at at the moment the zoe symptom tracker data and then when we see the increasing cases where we see it is increasing but we know that the actual number of infections are much higher than the symptomatic prevalence here so already this is a pretty good indicator that we're getting a lot of omicron asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infection people don't see it as being significant enough to report on the coverage symptom tracker app now let's go to the official data in the uk as well sticking with what we actually know so again we see about 59 000 people tested um positive in the uk uh this number has become pretty irrelevant now so people testing positive let's look at this one here so we do see it is starting to increase but of course it's uh it's nothing like the number of actual uh infections now healthcare is going to be critical in this let's see how we are in the healthcare situation so this is um this is the first one here is patience this is this one's actually patients in hospital let's look at uh this is patients admitted so these are new admissions in hospital so we see that new admissions are not increasing dramatically they're still around about the 800 850 per day total patience in hospital at the moment well with covered a positive diagnosis we're looking at just over seven thousand seven and a half thousand at the moment and we see that that graph is not increasing sharply at the present time which of course is very reassuring but of course we do know we have the three or four week delay to hospitalization and looking at the death rate in the uk well we do see that it's thankfully uh well i mean there's still deaths going on of course but um the rate is much lower than it has been these are people dying within 28 days of a positive diagnosis so let's look at what's happening in the uk try and make a bit of sense of it so that was the first data we looked at that was the second data we looked at and we saw that for the very high prevalence we're getting a relatively low number of hospitalizations at the moment but of course these cases that are becoming infectious now are going to peak in about three weeks time in three to four weeks time in terms of hospitalization so we still have a bit of a question mark on that now boris johnson prime minister um uk faces a huge spike in omicron infections obviously this is in virtually every news outlet in the uk check it out for yourself now mr sanjay javid the health secretary um no variant of covered 19 has spread this fast absolutely 100 true everyone now agrees on this this is by far the fastest spreading variant we have ever seen it is spreading around the planet incredibly quickly i want to say the planet that is exactly what i mean we are all going to be exposed to this i think we're all going to be not many of us are going to not be exposed to this we're all going to be exposed to this in the next short period of time depending on where you live so this is out of date now of course confirmed cases health the uk health security agency 200 000 new cases per day over 20 of cases in england of course this is always out of date it's probably probably 30 now actually without exaggeration london it was 44 we now believe this is well over 50 percent in london so this is now the uh the omicron is now the majority of cases um still only 10 confirmed cases in hospital that might have changed in the last hour or two but that was the last one i had heard so relatively low number but of course it's early days yet the inflammatory features of this condition take time to develop so we know there's a lag two three even four weeks dramatic a dramatic increase in the days and weeks that lie ahead so sachin travers says there is going to be a dramatic increase in hospitalizations there's going to be an increase in hospitalizations for sure how dramatic it's going to be we we don't know that dramatically is the question mark there uh the increase is certainly going to occur nhs england returning to its highest level of emergence preparedness level four uh third dose um a third dose of vaccine 70 effective at preventing symptomatic infection so this is the uk data so if you've had three doses um 70 protection against symptomatic infection getting any symptomatic infection which of course could explain a lot of the disparity already that we've noticed between the um the actual number of new infections per day we're getting well in excess of 200 000 now and the relatively lower number on the coverage symptom tracker study because many people are getting asymptomatic infection 70 protection from the third dose of the vaccine from getting symptomatic disease at all so basically you'd never know that you had it you'd never know you've been exposed to it um covered uh people should wait people that actually had covered infection should wait 28 days from their positive result to get a booster i think it's an important point so if you just recovered from covered in the last week or two don't rush out and get a booster straight away wait at least a month before you get your booster after you've had an actual covered infection otherwise you'll it's like light and make you feel quite ill for a few days uh fully vaccinated contacts of covenant will now better take daily lateral flow tests instead of self-isolating but of course when they do test positive they should still isolate for 10 days and given that there's going to be an awful lot of people testing positive this could make quite a dent in the essential workforce i think there's a i think in parliament i think there's about 18 people officially diagnosed parliamentarians already but they all crowd into that little old-fashioned building so um it's not surprising i don't know how good the ventilation is in there i think it's reasonable but they're still all crowded in together footballers are off sick 100 london tube train drivers are off sick this is just going to get this is just going to grow there will be issues with supply but there won't be any starvation essential food supplies will be available um there's any question about that we're well capable of ensuring that um susan hopkins uk health security agency um this is growing very fast with a growth rate initially of two to three days so the worst thing about 2.4 days doubling time so the number of cases doubling every 2.4 days and the growth rate seems to be shortening rather than lengthening so that like started off as about three days then it went down to 2.4 days and now it's doubling virtually well is it doubling about every 2.2 days something like that so it actually the rate of growth actually seems to be increasing as well quite incredible we're going to have a very uh difficult four weeks ahead i think that's okay that's a fair thing to say risk of infection omicron varying eight times higher than the delta variant is what she's saying so we're saying it's eight times more transmissible now the delta variant was pretty transmissible but here we have a health security agency dr susan hopkins saying this is eight times more transmissible than the delta variant this is um this is a transmissible variant no two ways about that million cases per day by the end of december professor graham medley infectious disease modeling underscore of hygiene and tropical medicine we looked at one of their papers just recently the number of infections means that even though individually we are at less risk at a population level the number of people ending up in hospital could be very large so the risk to the individual relatively small but because so many people could be infected all at the same time this could be the problem this is what we're worried about um now this was the that was the statement from uh javid there if you want to check that out make sure i'm not making this up that's the full government documented statement there from mr javid uh this is the letter from the uh chief uh or to all the bot basically all the hospital bosses in the uk saying get ready for this and again i've put the link there preparing the nhs for the potential impact of omicron variant and other winter pressures of course other winter pressures have not gone away we're always busy uh this time of year at the best of times so amanda pritchard nhs england chief executive susan powers nhs improvements chief executive um patients medically fit to be sent home now any one time in the uk there's about 10 000 people in hospitals in the uk who don't need to be there the reason they're there is they can't be safely discharged because we have a duty of care to safely discharge people but very often where do you discharge them too because we're struggling for uh for social care facilities um so but the government want half of those patients chucked out basically i mean safely discharged to alternative uh venues um we sometimes don't should tell you this but but in hospital we often refer to these patients as bed blockers it's no fault of the individual not at all but that's that's the terminology that sometimes use because they actually don't need the medical care of a hospital facility they need they need social care so patients medically fit to be sent home where possible managers of hospitals have to manage oxygen supplies make sure the oxygen supplies are good and they have been advised to increase critical care capacity basically the country's on a bit of a war footing manchester united i've had to cancel a game of football 20 42 premier league footballers are self-isolating due to a positive diagnosis and i just put this on to uh i mean you can always watch replays of previous games they're almost the same anyway but but um grocery store workers nurses doctors delivery drivers all the people that make society work that we take for granted postman you know everyone who's doing an essential job quietly it's a bit like when you injure your hand you don't know you use your fingers till you haven't got them and uh that's the situation we're in it is going to be difficult we're gonna have to be patient over the next few weeks but that's that letter there so check it out for yourself um they are preparing to be fair and this is quite correct of course because they do have a duty of care that they are preparing for a worst case scenario and that's the right thing to do professor chris whittie chief medical officer every adult needs to get a booster jab in the face of the highly infectious variant professor witty says boosters give you the best possible protection against the virus should significantly reduce your risk of serious illness and hospitalization now given that he had the opportunity and that the entire public of the united kingdom was probably hanging on hanging on his every word why did he not mention get your vitamin d levels up because we know this is important in immunity people that are low on vitamin d are immunocompromised this is not that's not i haven't just made a debatable statement i think everyone would agree with that i'm sure everyone would agree with that people that are deficient in vitamin d are immunocompromised it's that simple everyone needs to get their vitamin d up zinc needs to be taken perhaps like only on a temporary basis but for the next week or two zinc supplements should be considered get plenty of sleep go to bed an hour earlier sleep is so again this is not no this is not speculation we know that tight people are more immunocompromised if you get good sleep you're more likely to have a good immune system but why don't they mention all these common things good nutrition as we were talking about with dr cohen just the other day from israel now also um i i wanted to do this because what actually happened was i was starting to prepare this and there's just so much stuff i was getting completely confused so i thought i'd do the uk first but then um there's this paper from um well there's the whole global issue of course we want to look at but there's this paper from south africa which we also want to look at from the discovery um health group in combination with the south african medical research council that are coming up with some fairly uh i wouldn't say definitive answers but by far the best answers we've got at the moment so there's a study that they've just published yesterday so we want to have a look at that next but we'll leave that there for that one otherwise i just get completely confused and you would get bored so so there we go a million cases of omicron in the uk by the end of the month and i would predict two or three million cases of omicron per day in the united states and basically on a per capita basis around the world by the end of january this is the way we were going it is going to induce massive herd immunity um the data from south africa is showing us a small but smaller proportion of people will get sick but given that it's everyone all of a sudden so instead of having a nice level sort of peaks like we've had but this is going to absolutely scooting up is going to be absolutely huge peak the numbers are going to then going to go come down quite quickly in in in how tang for example the epicenter in south africa the number of new infections are already coming down already coming down so um so in the uk we're going to be absolutely sky-high in terms of omicron infections by the end of december beginning of january but the rate is going it's probably going to well work it out for yourself we're getting a million new infections per day we're looking at potentially 30 million infections in january that's half of the population of the uk being infected be at least being exposed within a month period so we're looking at pretty well the entire population are going to be exposed to omicron but by sort of mid to the end of february in in the uk and that's going to induce huge amounts of immunity lots of people ask me is this immunity going to work against other variants the answer is yes to what degree of course is going to vary depending on the particular genetic profile of that variant for some new variants this could be immensely useful in which case those variants won't won't take hold in the first place but there could be some immune escape with other variants which are yet to pop up but i would expect it to give us a fairly high degree of protection against severe illness and death which is one of the main reasons uh as we'll look at when we look at the south african data that people are not getting sick very much in high percentages in south africa because they've got so much natural immunity in south africa or even low vaccination rates are about 70 of people have had the natural immunity from previous infection waves so we do have this uh community herd immunity to look forward to but we do have the next few weeks to get through but that's enough for this one and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 784,210

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

Id: pfO8verFP7E

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021