As a precaution against what will surely be misreported by the press, here is a thought experiment with some numbers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK is reporting a doubling time of 2 days. Suppose there are 100 Omicron cases now,\u00a0 then in 2 weeks we would have 12,800 people testing positive on a given day if everyone was tested. (Seven doublings means multiply by 2*2*2*2*2*2*2 = 128 = 2^7 . ) Suppose, as may very be true, that Omicron is substantially less virulent than Delta. Let’s assume a hospitalization rate of say 1% instead of Delta’s 2.3% which will happen 2 weeks after a positive test. (Hospitalizations lag positive tests by about 2 weeks for all versions of Covid so far). Then, from our initial 100 cases, there would only be one hospitalization in the two weeks that follow because 1% of a 100 is 1! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what does this mean? Should we say that Omicron doesn’t seem to result in any significant hospitalizations? Of course not, the signal is hidden in the noise. But I betcha that we can expect some of the more innumerate press to say that Omicron has “a vanishingly small chance of being hospitalized”. After all, 1\/12,800 is<\/em> pretty darn small – it just isn’t what is going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a precaution against what will surely be misreported by the press, here is a thought experiment with some numbers. The UK is reporting a doubling time of 2 days. Suppose there are 100 Omicron cases now,\u00a0 then in 2 weeks we would have 12,800 people testing positive on a given day if everyone was … Continue reading “A very, very very fast spreading disease, severe outcomes take longer to develop – what happens to reported rates of hospitalization?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}