A lull seems to be taking shape in the critical care services which receive Covid patients, where hospitalizations are down slightly for the third day in a row, according to official figures released on Saturday evening.
These services have 3,852 seriously ill with Covid, against 3,895 the day before, 3,939 Thursday and 3,985 Wednesday.
On the other hand, this drop is not observed either in the total number of hospitalized patients (24,544, against 23,889 Wednesday), nor in the daily number of new cases of contamination identified.
The latter stands at 324,580, against 303,669 the previous Saturday. However, the increase seems to be slowing down since the number of cases was 219,126 on Saturday January 1.
Too early to draw conclusions
It is too early to draw conclusions from the onset of decline observed in critical care but, if confirmed, it could be linked to the characteristics of the Omicron variant.
It is more transmissible than its predecessor Delta and also seems to cause fewer serious forms of the disease, without knowing to what extent this is due to its characteristics or to the fact that the population is already partly immunized by vaccination or from previous infections.
For all these reasons, specialists consider it possible that Omicron saturates less resuscitation, since it causes less serious forms, while weighing heavily on hospital beds in general.