The news from London, England on patients with COVID that are supposedly overrunning their hospitals is, apparently, not all it was made to be.
A new report has shown that 60 percent of the “COVID” patients are being treated for conditions that are not primarily COVID related.
In other words, yes, they happened to test positive for COVID but that is not why they are in the hospital, The Daily Mail reported.
NHS England’s most up-to-date figures, released today, show almost 3,000 beds were occupied by patients who were infected with the virus on January 18. But just 1,200 were mainly unwell with the coronavirus, with the others treated for separate conditions.
The proportion of patients who are incidentally infected has fallen in line with explosion of Omicron, illustrating how the current wave is milder than previous surges.
And the picture is similar nationally, with just 7,600 of England’s 14,600 Covid ‘patients’ primarily being treated for something else — meaning 47.9 per cent are so-called incidental cases.
Pressure on the NHS is already receding. Daily admissions peaked towards the end of December at around half the level seen during the spike last winter.
The downward trends spurred ministers to lift the remaining curbs, with guidance to WFH ending yesterday, while Covid passes for some large events and requirements to wear masks in public are being dropped next Thursday.
The data also showed that hospital staff absences have fallen 40 percent in the past 10 days.
They did argue that even though the cases are incidental they still put a strain on staff because those patients have to be isolated to stop the spread of the COVID virus.
In December a UK study showed that the Omicron variant was less severe than Alpha and Delta, The Washington Post reported.
“This is a qualified good-news story,” Jim McMenamin, a co-author of the study and the national covid-19 incident director at Public Health Scotland, said.
“Our analysis shows evidence of a moderate reduction in the risk of hospitalization associated with the omicron variant compared with the delta variant,” Neil Ferguson, who led the group of researchers, said. “However, this appears to be offset by the reduced efficacy of vaccines against infection with the omicron variant.”
“This is the key data point we needed to estimate the likely peak and total number of admissions in the coming weeks,” Raghib Ali, a clinical research associate and epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge, said. “And while further data is needed to confirm these studies, the worst-case scenarios that were presented last week can safely be excluded.”
But that further data appears to have arrived.
