I really appreciate that you did all the work to put this together. But there's an issue. We already know that younger patients are going to have milder cases. This was true with Delta; there's no reason to believe that it won't be true with Omicron. South Africa has a very young population (average age 26.) There's no reason why we would expect to see more severe cases in these much younger people. We'd also expect to see vaccine protection against severe outcome. It all says nothing about whether the virus itself has become intrinsically milder or not. That's something that we simply don't yet know.
There are no adjustments in any of this data. These are themes to look out for as the analytical work gets published over the coming weeks.
I guess your hypothesis begs the question - why aren't older patients showing up in the hospital? And if it's because the age profile has always skewed young then the other severity factors, like length of stay, would point towards a milder virus.
I really appreciate that you did all the work to put this together. But there's an issue. We already know that younger patients are going to have milder cases. This was true with Delta; there's no reason to believe that it won't be true with Omicron. South Africa has a very young population (average age 26.) There's no reason why we would expect to see more severe cases in these much younger people. We'd also expect to see vaccine protection against severe outcome. It all says nothing about whether the virus itself has become intrinsically milder or not. That's something that we simply don't yet know.
There are no adjustments in any of this data. These are themes to look out for as the analytical work gets published over the coming weeks.
I guess your hypothesis begs the question - why aren't older patients showing up in the hospital? And if it's because the age profile has always skewed young then the other severity factors, like length of stay, would point towards a milder virus.