So, we have all heard the scare stories of how the national covid service (sorry, national health service) is going to be overrun by omicron cases, but how likely is that to actually happen?
If you believe the nhs chiefs and sage fear porn, the whole of the nhs is going to collapse under the weight of omicron cases in about 5 days time. But is this really a reality? Personally, I don't believe it is, so using available data, and making some conservative assumptions where the data is not available, I have done some modelling of my own.
To bring this into context, I will outline the data used for modelling, and the calculations behind the results (something you will never get from sage or others)
Information used is as follows -
Delta -
R-Rate 5.08
Hospitalisation chance 25% needing oxygen (Age 41-54 with 5 confirmed symptoms)
Omicron -
R-Rate 3.47
Hospitalisation chance 8% needing oxygen (based on a reduction of 66% reduction in chance of needing oxygen)
Chances of requiring hospitalisation compared to delta is reduced by 20%
Assumptions made as follows -
Patient can continue to infect at R-Rate indefinitely and repeatedly
R-Rate is reached every two days
Patient ZERO of each variant is infected at the same time
Each infection has a 25% chance of being symptomatic and requiring hospital admission
Calculations made -
From day 0 to day 2, patient ZERO is multiplied by the R-Rate and then added to the result. Day 2 to day 4, the resulting figure from day 2 is multiplied by the R-Rate and then added to the day 2 result. This is continued until a 30 day period is reached
For Omicron and Delta, the figures look like this
Based on the above figures, Delta is easily outpacing infections from Omicron which doesn't seem right as omicron is supposedly more infectious.
To try and get to the scare scenario that we are being told, we are going to increase the R-Rate for Omicron by 50%
This then gives us these figures
As you can see, this is completely ridiculous, as the entirety of the UK would be infected in a little under three weeks, but for the sake of this exercise, lets run with that figure.
Now, bearing in mind that Omicron is less severe, and is 20% less likely to require hospitalisation we can look at the chance of presenting to hospital with 5 symptoms. To allow for asymptomatic cases, the figure of 25% of all infections requiring hospitalisation will be used.
From the cases (adjusted to increase the R-Rate of Omicron by 50%), we see that the following number of people will be presenting to hospital
From this, we can see that Omicron is outpacing Delta, but we haven't taken into account that Omicron is 20% less likely to require hospitalisation. So, lets multiply Omicron figures by 0.8 to reflect the 20% reduction in hospitalisation.
We now have these figures
Again, Delta has now become the dominant strain in the figures, and this is not fitting with what we are being told about Omicron.
But what about the cases that require hospitalisation AND oxygen?
That is a very good question, as each case is different. Zoeycovid study states that those aged 41-54 presenting at hospital with 5 symptoms have a 25% chance of requiring oxygen, so we will now use that figure to to see where things go
Interestingly, this shows again that Delta is the dominant strain, and we haven't even taken into account the Omicron is 66% less likely to require the patient to receive oxygen whilst in hospital
Now the figures start to diverge wildly as you can see from below
The problem we have is that accurate information is not available, either because the people telling us what is going on are keeping it quiet, or it is simply not available and they are making it up as they go along
The questions you should really be asking are...
If there is no evidence available, what justification do you have for shutting down the country?
If evidence is available, what evidence is it, and why are you not publishing the data for peer review?