Over the past two weeks, the COVID-19 virus has reasserted itself with stunning speed, which health experts predicted was likely from the highly contagious omicron variant.
But there is some very good news this time around: A far lower rate of patients infected in recent weeks has become sick enough to require hospitalization. And the number of deaths is lower than during prior waves of the virus.
The infection numbers by themselves are scary. Three weeks ago, the Mississippi State Department of Health was reporting 400 to 900 new infections each day. The count was rising, but not enough to be overly alarming.
The alarm bells rang over the New Year’s weekend. In the four days from Thursday, Dec. 30, to last Sunday, the state reported 17,525 infections — nearly 4,400 per day. Monday’s infection count was 4,840, Tuesday’s was 6,592 and Wednesday’s hit 7,079.
That’s 36,000 infections in six days. If that rate continues — which seems unlikely — everyone in Mississippi will be infected in a few months.
A year ago, news like this would have been scary indeed. The vaccine had just arrived, and a significant number of people who got infected wound up dying.
It’s different with omicron. As reported a few weeks ago in the countries where doctors first found the variant, the infections generally cause milder illness than previous versions of COVID-19. The rate of hospital cases and deaths has declined.
So far, that experience seems to be holding up in Mississippi as well. The Department of Health’s reports for Dec. 30 through Wednesday list a total of 61 deaths — in a period when the state had almost 36,000 infections. Even if deaths are a lagging indicator, it’s improbable that the fatality rate will be anything close to what the original strain or other variants produced.
TheWhyAxis website has charts that provide an excellent comparison of infections and hospitalizations for three COVID-19 variants. It makes the argument that while this virus is still a serious health threat, the fact that omicron is more transmissible but less likely to cause serious illness means we’re making progress.
Last summer’s delta wave had an almost perfect correlation, from July 1 to Oct. 1, between the number of new infections to the number of people being treated for COVID-19 in a hospital.
Before that was the alpha wave, from Oct. 1, 2020, to Jan. 8, 2021. It is not quite the perfect line of the delta wave, but it’s in the arena.
The current omicron wave is requiring, however, a significantly smaller percentage of hospitalizations. If it followed prior trends, we would have three or four times as many COVID-19 patients in hospitals, which would be once again overrun.
The obvious reason for less serious illnesses this time around is that our bodies are adapting to this new threat. Vaccines and natural immunity are doing their work. Plus outpatient treatments — such as monoclonal antibodies — have been developed that can arrest the progress of the disease before it gets to a critical stage.
If omicron keeps on its current course — which is no guarantee — the lesson is that humanity will survive this virus, just as it survived the 1918 influenza pandemic. That’s something to look forward to after the past two years.
