A person ill with Covid-19, infected with Omicron, would have about a 75% lower risk of being placed in intensive care, and more than 90% less risk of dying, than a person infected with the Delta variant, according to an American study conducted on more than 70,000 people who tested positive.
Of the more than 52,000 people infected with Omicron followed by this study, none needed a life support, compared to 11 of the nearly 17,000 infected with Delta. In addition, the median length of hospital stays was 1.5 days for Omicron, compared to nearly five days for Delta.
Vaccines also protect against Omicron
In addition, if this work noted a reduced effectiveness of the vaccines against infections linked to Omicron, the protection remained nonetheless substantial against the serious forms of the disease.
Despite everything, the director of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). pointed out that Omicron’s very high contagiousness automatically led to a large number of hospitalizations, putting pressure on a healthcare system whose staff had already been strained for two years.
The country currently records an average of 750,000 new cases per day, and about 1,600 deaths daily. More than 150,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in the United States, a record.
This analysis was conducted using data from the California hospital system of Kaiser Permanente, during the month of December 2021, when both variants were circulating widely.
The study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Kaiser Permanente, and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).