servodude wrote:Hallucigenia wrote:It's only been in existence for maybe 6-7 weeks so there will only be a handful in hospital in the UK yet.
I've been trying to do the back of a fag pack calcs on this
Given that it shows pretty easily in PCR tests... how many cases do you currently expect are about in the UK?
And how many, given vaccine coverage, would you expect to need to have before any reasonable judgement on the relative virulence could be made?
Basically, how much do you need out there to decided whether you need to take further action or not?!
-sd
Prof Alastair Grant has access to a non-public SPI-M datafeed that includes S-gene dropout data from the 40% of tests with S-gene primers.
He says there's been 994 S-gene dropouts out of 256k tests in those labs since 20 November - ie 0.4% of the cumulative total since then, suggesting 2500 in total (although tests on travellers have probably been preferentially given to the S-gene labs?). S-gene dropouts were 2% of swabs on 4 November.
Obviously S-gene dropout is not a perfect indicator of omicron, not least because some members of the omicron lineage don't show S-gene dropout, but it's the best we have at the moment.
The really scary thing is that both the UK and SA seem to be showing a doubling time of 3 days or less, whereas the delta wave was showing a doubling time of 2 weeks. So in the time delta takes to go from 1 case to 2 cases, omicron will go from 1 case to 10+ cases, the current Rt seems to be around 3.5.
The time for action was last week.