I'm not sure the Ferguson paper from yesterday has been understood.
The intrinsic severity of the infection from omicron is estimated down only 30% compared to delta (0.72 hazard ratio for overnight hospital admission).
This is obviously better than no reduction, but not transformative. Indeed, it's far less significant than the transmission advantage. It's also near identical to estimates from SA, so consistent.
Most of the observed reduction in severity is rather down to the fact that there are far more reinfections and infections of vaccinated people.
Interestingly, booster jabs seem to give no better protection against hospitalisation
once infected than double jabbing - but they do give substantial protection against infection, so overall massively reduce your risk.
Overall, I think this is consistent with the emerging picture. Omicron is probably a little less severe intrinsically, but much more transmissible. It readily escapes immunity, however vaccination and/or prior infection offer good protection vs hospitalisation. This means the apparent severity is much lower, because most infected people are well protected vs severe disease.
There's still a lot of uncertainty on the numbers in the paper as there have been few hospitalisation to date. There's far more uncertainty still on the progress of the wave, which depends on behaviour. It's starting to look as though there's been a marked reduction in contacts, which helps enormously. Reported numbers will now also be all over the place through the holiday period.
As an aside, it's amusing to find the people who normally find Ferguson's work unspeakable lauding this paper!
I've not read the Scottish one. Anyone who has done care to comment?
[Edit: meant to add that it's quite a complex analysis, so I may well have got some of this wrong. Happy to be corrected if so]
www.telegraph.co.uk
