Up to 5,200 people per day could be hospitalized if the current trajectory does not learn, estimate the models. Hospitals had about 24,000 patients with the disease on Wednesday.
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One month and a half after his detection in South Africa, the Omicron variant is already nearly 90% of the new CVIV-19 cases in France. “Much more contagious, much less dangerous”, its impact, however, appears difficult to anticipate, especially as the Delta variant continues to circulate at a high level. Of the some 400,000 people infected each day, how much will need to be hospitalized? How many beds should be predicted in conventional hospitalization and resuscitation according to the profile of patients? To what extent can we draw conclusions from what happens in other countries? It is to all these questions that the modellers of the Institut Pasteur attempt to answer in An analysis online Wednesday, January 12 , to specify the scenarios developed at the end of December 2021 from the first data available.
For this, the researchers compared their curves to those drawn by the virus over the last fifteen days, in order to remove all the scenarios that moved away to keep only the most “probable”. According to the most likely hypotheses now – a virus at once 80% more transmissible and 80% less severe -, up to 5,200 people per day could be hospitalized at the peak of the epidemic if the current trajectory does not learn . If it appears that at the return of the holidays the French have reduced their contacts by 10%, the peak could be reduced to 3,600 – the level reached during the first peak of 2020 – or even 2,500 if this reduction is 20 %.
“The impact of control measures – including teleworking – and behavioral changes is very uncertain. These numbers are orders of magnitude,” says Simon Cauchemez, modeler at the Pasteur Institute and a member of the Scientific Council. “A little effort of everyone can have a significant impact and relieve the hospital. Do not forget it,” he insists.
up to 6,000 people in critical care
In conventional hospitalization, the number of patients to be supported simultaneously could rise to 32,000, 23,000 and 17,000 depending on whether the contacts are reduced by 0%, 10% or 20%. In resuscitation, taking into account a much smaller admission probability with Omicron than Delta, patients could occupy 6,000, 4,700 or 3,900 beds respectively. More optimistic or more pessimistic scenarios are also envisaged. For example, if patients, less severely achieved, spend less time in the hospital or if the calling campaign argues slower than expected – 800,000 recall injections in the model against less than 600,000 in reality. “In all the scenarios, the peak of admissions to the hospital is expected in the second half of January, with a maximum impact on the occupation of beds end of January-current February. The peak of infections is expected in mid-January”, specify the models.
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