Having omnicron "rip through" would actually be a great thing, I've just read an article from Belgium saying they have no patients with omnicron in ICUs. It does seem some people need supervision but I presume the load is much much reduced. Also omnicron doesn't seem to spare vaccinated neither in symptoms nor in infection rate, but that's just anecdotal, maybe someone has other information?
In fact the opposite is true. If everyone gets coronavirus in a two week period, ICU is less overwhelmed for the rest of the year. A lot of susceptible people die, of course.
If you attempt to spread it out and succeed, you're at 100% capacity basically all of the time, plus 99% of people get to deal with the fact that coronavirus restrictions are utterly miserable.
Omicron has probably made all of this irrelevant anyway, it's so contagious that effectively everyone who goes outside is getting it this month. 1 in 15 in London right now and that's only the confirmed cases I believe.
I am not an antivaxxer, but 0.2 per cent is 2 per thousand, and 100 per cent of the population won't get covid at the same time, even if the entire population was naive to the virus.
The worst problem with covid is probably not the raw death rate, but that the ICU patients often take weeks to either improve or die.
ICUs are not designed for long stays; prior to covid, median ICU stay was fairly short (I found a figure of 2 days and mean of 3.4 days [0]). But for example, my GP, who died of covid in early 2020, stayed on life support for six weeks before his body finally gave up.
Your only argument is not clogging up the ICUs. The only age group that has a significant risk is 60+, so isolate them or vax them or both. Forceful vaccination of 12-17 years olds will do exactly nothing for ICUs.
I also do not understand the focus on ICUs. Put up military field hospitals, intubation is questionable anyhow, just give oxygen. Most facilities in ICUs are not required for Covid (as I understand it, happy to be corrected if someone here actually has first hand experience).
With treatment. 10-20% of patients end up requiring intensive medical support, including mechanical ventilation. Will they recieve it? It's more contagious than the Spanish Flu. There simply aren't enough ICU beds - let alone ones equipped to isolate highly contagious disease.
But… they did. It effectively keeps most of the vaccinated out of the ICU.
> 4 in 5 COVID-19 patients in intensive care are not vaccinated against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The chance that a fully vaccinated person will end up in ICU due to COVID-19 is 33 times lower than for a non-vaccinated person. : https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/4-in-5-covid-19-patients-in-icu-...
> n this cross-sectional study of US adults hospitalized with COVID-19 during January 2022 to April 2022 (during Omicron variant predominance), COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates were 10.5 times higher in unvaccinated persons and 2.5 times higher in vaccinated persons with no booster dose, respectively, compared with those who had received a booster dose. Compared with unvaccinated hospitalized persons, vaccinated hospitalized persons were more likely to be older and have more underlying medical conditions. : https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
And I could link up a dozen similar studies and reports that all say the same thing: the risks from vaccination are low, the risks from Covid are an order of magnitude greater.
You have made this fraudulent claim twice. Along with, it appears, promoting a conspiracy theory that renegade researchers developed it as a bio weapon. You are, in my opinion, a terrible person, worthy of condemnation and dismissal.
In the US, even before the pandemic, ICUs were typically run at very close to capacity. From Becker's Hospital Review[1]:
> For most level 1 trauma centers and tertiary care facilities, operating intensive care units at 80 percent to 90 percent capacity is standard — even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
In bad flu years, ERs are commonly overwhelmed[2] even though we obviously have vaccines that provide so-so protection:
I suspect that the situation in Europe is much the same.
Even if the vaccines continue to provide good protection against hospitalization, that doesn't mean that breakthrough infections won't have any impact on the healthcare system. As an anecdote, I just learned that a friend, who is a super fit collegiate athlete, just had a breakthrough infection and almost went to the ER because her symptoms were quite bad. She decided against it and the symptoms subsided within a couple of days, but if you hear about and read enough reports about breakthrough infections, it's pretty clear that it's not rare for "mild" cases to be pretty rough -- rough enough to have some people thinking about a visit to the hospital.
SARS-CoV-2 is well on its way to being endemic (it basically already is) so if we're being honest about getting back to normal, it's time for public health decision makers to be more realistic about the impact the virus will have on the healthcare system. Practically speaking, that means being prepared for high utilization and expanding capacity.
Current numbers are already manageable. At the Omicron wave peak, total ICU beds are 70% full. And recent (official) data shown that 30% of all COVID positive hospitalizations were actually unrelated to COVID, that number being as high as 50% for 0-49 age group. Yet our politicians refuse to drop restrictions, they even doubled down by making vaccination mandatory to go anywhere, when a negative test used to be enough.
"Something like ECMO is extremely invasive and limited to maybe a few per ICU."
Better supportive intensive care is exactly what lowers the case fatality rates for viral pneumonia. And this is very unlikely to become a hospital capacity problem.
What are normal ICU levels and is this a goalpost that can ever be achieved?
Long before Covid, it was well-known that hospital ICUs were designed to run fairly close to 100% capacity because it wasn't profitable to pay for staff that weren't truly needed at any given time. Is there any hospital that is going to pay for far more staff than they need and somehow manufacture many ICU beds out of nowhere? I feel like this is a goalpost intentionally designed to never be achievable.
As further evidence, if the situation was actually so dire, would unvaccinated people (many of whom already had Covid) be on the chopping block in so many locations?
Anecdotally, the hospital my partner works at has been frantically converting almost all of their floors to covid floors due to the influx of patients. But, few require ICU/ventilator.
So yes it's bad/dangerous in that hospitals may fill to overflowing and struggle to treat covid or non-covid patients, but not bad in that Omicron is directly killing more people than Delta et al.
Even if we had zero ICUs or ventilators the COVID-19 fatality rate would only be marginally higher. The vast majority of patients who are going to survive will do so regardless of whether they receive ICU level care. The current care protocol recommends mechanical ventilation only as a last resort. Most of the effective treatments can be delivered at lower care levels.
Fortunately, as time goes on we'll improve our ICU capacity and it's likely that some anti-viral treatments will turn out to be effective, which should diminish the ICU load.
We could within half a year-- given massive impact from deaths and shutdowns encouraging bypassing some amount of protocol-- have clonal antibody treatments that prevent hospitalization in a large portion of infections.
I don't think ICU's are 100% full. There's also a double whammy where hospitals are reducing beds because of staffing shortages directly caused by Omicron infections.
I don't know that there are documented non-COVID deaths due to it, but various parts of the southern US (where vaccination rates are low) have reported ICUs at or near capacity. E.g.
One has to assume that at a certain level there is a finite quantity of medical care available at a given facility, and a spike in COVID cases would deplete it. Whether or not that threshold has been crossed, and if not how close such places are to crossing it, is an interesting question.
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