Maybe?:
Clinical Severity of COVID-19 Patients Admitted to Hospitals in Gauteng, South Africa During the Omicron-Dominant Fourth Wave by Waasila Jassat, Salim Abdool Karim, Caroline Mudara, Richard Welch, Lovelyn Ozougwu, Michelle Groome, Nevashan Govender, Anne von Gottberg, Nicole Wolter, DATCOV Author Group, Lucille Blumberg, Cheryl Cohen :: SSRN
"TL;DR, we don’t know yet but tentative evidence suggests that omicron
might be milder — but not all that much milder.
Overall, there’s a general sense that omicron
might be about 25-50% milder (less likely to cause severe disease).
That means that older, unvaccinated people are still seriously at risk. It’s good for young, healthy people, but the severity is so much worse in old people, or those with immune problems etc, that a mere 25% reduction in risk isn’t going to make a huge difference. Even a 50% reduction on severity - which would be
great — will see millions of hospitalizations as omicron re-infects the vulnerable elderly."
"And it can be worse even if Omicron causes severe illness a lower percentage of the time if Omicron infects more people. Let's say that Delta causes severe illness in 40 of every 100 people it infects. (I'm making up numbers here because I don't know the exact numbers and the exact numbers aren't the point. So don't quote these numbers.) Now let's say Omicron causes severe illness in 30 of every 100 people it infects. That's a 25% reduction. However, if Omicron infects twice as many people then, it will inflict severe illness on more people than Delta did. This will cause more strain on our hospitals which, in turn, will reduce hospital capacity (via occupied beds and via hospital workers getting sick)."
(taken from
)
