Yeah, those charts look great /s. It's a darn good thing that omicron is not quite as deadly and that so many people are vaccinated, or we'd be a "bring out your dead" Monty Python sketch (without the funny part).
It may be that Omicron is about as infectious as Delta, but infects most people with prior exposure (infection or vaccines) almost as if they had no resitance. (the exception being 3x exposed and 2x and recent mRNA/AZ/mRNA).
Oh, and has a 3 day lifecycle.
6x every 3 days is 2x every 1.6 days, or 32 days from 1 to a million infections.
SA data has problems, because they already lost 0.5% of the population to covid 19 (excess death data) and are a young population; so nearly 100% of population was previously exposed. Delta was dying from herd immunity; omicron reinfected almost everyone.
In an area with near total vaccination and previous infection things may be similar to SA (at least in the youth). But immuno compromised may be in trouble. And I guess the correlation of anti vax and anti mask means that people who are in that corner are probably already previously infected.
Also, we have zero long covid data from Omicron.
The graph is limited by testing capabilities. UK being high is evidence of ability to test more than anything compared to others.
Ontario had its capacity plummit, because it was doing batch testing (test 10 samples at once, if all are negative the batch is negative; if they are positive, retest individual samples). Test positivity has spiked to 50% in some areas, rendering batch testing inefficient, causing capacity to plummet.
A problem remains that severe cases can lag diagnosis by weeks. And we have this vertical line of cases. If the best case scenario doesn't develop, by the time we know that it is 2 weeks too lste to fix it.
So here is hoping. We have battered down the hatches and are hoping to weather the wave. Based on SA and exponential geometry, this spike may be over in a month, and by then we'll learn how bad it is.
Still have my O2 concentrators in a box downstairs.