![]() So that's the sort of main pictures that we see around the pandemic or COVID transmission in different parts of the world. But given the large number of susceptible individuals in China and the very low levels of past infection, the potential for an explosive epidemic always remains there, especially if the zero-COVID strategy was backed off even a little bit within China. President Xi Jinping has made it clear, at least publicly, that they plan to continue with the zero-COVID strategy.Īnd so when we build that into the models, we don't see a huge surge in China. Continuing zero-COVID strategy in ChinaĬhina is the last big question mark, where there have been mixed signals from different groups in China about whether or not the zero-COVID strategy would continue. So until we learn more about the German surge and whether it's associated with more severe disease, we remain reasonably, cautiously optimistic that the winter will have more infections, maybe not so many cases because of the great reduction in the infection-detection rate, and we should see quite a few hospitalizations with COVID, but not so many due to COVID. We do expect that the sort of smaller, slow increases in the northeast of the US, as an example, are the beginning of people going back to school, winter seasonality starting to kick in, so we continue to expect considerable increases in infections through the Northern Hemisphere winter, but without major increases in deaths due to COVID – b ut quite a number of deaths with COVID, and same for hospitalizations. Again, we don't have good data at all separating out admissions due to COVID as compared to admissions with COVID, and so we're not really sure how consequential this big surge in Germany is and how consequential it will be for the rest of Europe. We should expect that to spread, probably due to BQ.1 or BQ.1.1 – n ot 100% sure because of lags in reporting of the sequencing data – but it should spread to other parts of Europe, we suspect. So we'll wait and see if that holds true in the next three or four days.īut the increase has already been quite large. The last couple of days it looks like COVID admissions may be coming down, but of course, there's this question of lags in reporting. The other area of concern is the really rapid increase in hospital admissions, as reported in Germany – h igher rates of hospital admission now than at any time previously in the COVID epidemic. Surge in Germany and predictions for Europe and the Northern Hemisphere And that has continued for all these Omicron sub-lineages so far. Our recalibration exercise has confirmed what we thought almost 10 months ago, that Omicron, including BA.5, remains more than 10-fold less severe than previous waves of the COVID pandemic. The other good news out of Singapore is that it doesn't seem to be more severe – if anything, slightly less severe. It still, however, means that those individuals and communities that have had low past Omicron infection, particularly BA.5, are at risk for the surge. So that's really good news in terms of its potential for global spread and impact. In fact, people who have been infected in the last three months, presumably with BA.5, had essentially almost no incidence of XBB. But the good news is that also, those analyses suggest there's no immune escape with BA.5. Very nice analyses out of Singapore, telling us that it's more transmissible. New subvariant XBBįirst, the XBB-related surge in hospitalizations in Singapore, and it's a pretty rapid increase in hospitalizations over a short period of time. ![]() And when we put that together with all the new data that we've seen in the last three or four weeks, our attention gets drawn to two key areas. In this week's analysis of COVID from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, we have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks recalibrating our model to reflect the differences between waves of variants for the infection-detection rate, the infection-hospitalization rate, and the infection-fatality rate. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity New research on long COVID shows it has affected millions worldwide and is more common in women than men.We predict winter seasonality in the Northern Hemisphere will bring more infections, but not a large increase in deaths.The surge in Germany may be due to subvariants BQ.1 or BQ.1.1, and will likely spread to other parts of Europe in the coming weeks.New analyses also show all subvariants of Omicron appear to be less severe than previous variants.New Omicron subvariant XBB does not appear to have immune escape with BA.5, meaning individuals who were previously infected with BA.5 will maintain their immunity against the new subvariant.
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