A South African study from the epicenter of the world’s omicron surge offers a tantalizing hint that the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic may be ending.
The infection wave moved with “unprecedented speed” and caused much milder illness than earlier strains, a study of patients infected with Covid-19 at a large hospital in the South African city where the first outbreak of the omicron variant was recorded showed.
The study at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital Complex analyzed records of 466 patients from the current wave and 3,976 from previous bouts of infection. Researchers that worked on it included Fareed Abdullah, a director at the council and an infectious disease doctor at the hospital. Still, the data add to hope among researchers that concern over omicron’s high transmission rates is being tempered by the mildness of the disease it appears to cause and the limited number of deaths that result from its infections.South African hospitalizations have crested at half of their record in previous waves. Weekly excess deaths, a measure of the number of deaths compared with a historical average, peaked at less than a fifth of their record during the pandemic.
The study showed that just 4.5% of patients with Covid-19 died during their hospital stay in the current wave compared with an average of 21% in earlier waves, according to the South African Medical Research Council’s website. Fewer people were admitted to intensive-care units, and hospital stays were “significantly shorter.”The rate of admissions climbed rapidly but began to decline within 33 days of the first analyzed, the study said. A snapshot of patients in the hospital on Dec.
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