Patients with Covid-19 stay less in hospital and are sent to intensive care less when they are infected with the Omicron variant, which has become the majority in France in recent weeks
Patients with Covid-19 stay in hospital for less time and are sent to intensive care less when they are infected with the Omicron variant, which has become the majority in France in recent weeks, the Minister of Health, Olivier, reported on Monday January 10. Véran.
Compared to its predecessors, Omicron “gives less respiratory distress, so it sends less intensive care patients,” said Mr. Véran during a hearing before the senators.
Appeared at the end of 2021, Omicron caused an explosion of Covid cases in France, as in many other countries, because of a much higher contagiousness than previous incarnations of the virus. But it is also clearly shown to be less dangerous, even if it is still difficult to determine to what extent this lesser severity will offset the explosion of cases.
Omicron still causes “fairly strong influenza syndromes” and leads, like previous versions of the virus, “a significant increase in hospitalizations”, warned Mr. Véran.
But “we know with sufficient hindsight now (that the stays are) shorter than with the previous variants,” he noted, noting that Omicron seems to affect the upper parts of the airways rather (and therefore affects less. lungs than other variants).
Hospitalized patients “are going to have three to four day oxygen requirements and […] then will be able to leave, ”detailed the Minister.
Encouraging signs
The Assistance Publique-Hôpital de Paris (AP-HP) studied the share of the Delta variant and the Omicron variant in new patients hospitalized in its departments for Covid-19 between December 1 and January 4, in critical care and in conventional hospitalization. These data relate to 3,112 patients.
“They show a clear increase in the proportion of patients infected with the Omicron variant in conventional hospitalization and until the beginning of January a stability in the proportion of patients infected with Omicron, who remain a very small minority in critical care”, notes the AP- HP in a press release. Thus she noted “on average over the last week of 2021, around 19% of daily admissions with Omicron in critical care and 54% in conventional hospitalization”.
Thus, the probability of having recourse to critical care is “three times higher in patients infected with the Delta variant than with the Omicron variant”, concludes the AP-HP. The duration of Covid hospitalizations is a crucial issue in measuring to what extent the health system risks being saturated.
In this regard, Olivier Véran refrained from advancing on the date of a possible peak but noticed that encouraging signs were coming from the United Kingdom, where Omicron spread before France.
“In the London area, where it struck first, it drops,” noted Mr. Véran, also citing South Africa, one of the first countries where Omicron was spotted, and where the wave linked to the variant now seems to have passed.