Where Omicron Covid cases detected in at least 17 states

Variant and of these cases some of them are travel related folks having been to Southern Africa others are community spread most of them so far reported to be mild a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated folks. We did hear about one case in New Jersey where the person was fully vaccinated sought emergency department care, but we do not know the extent of that and some pointing out that could just be a typical breakthrough case it was said that she had moderate symptoms but something catching a lot of attention over the weekend guys was a report out of South Africa from a regional hospital system there looking at the severity of cases the authors of this report saying it is really starkly different at the beginning of this fourth wave there than it has been from previous waves while we have seen hospital admissions tick up they report that a majority of these admissions are for diagnoses unrelated to covet they have a policy there of testing everybody in the hospital for covid, and so it seems like a lot of people are there, and then they turn out to have covid they didn't realize that they did many fewer of these patients require oxygen in the hospital, and they report that the covid related hospitalizations that stays there are a lot shorter two and a half days compared with eight and a half for the previous 18 months now this is also from the same report they look at the deaths from covid, and they have not yet seen them tick up that's the orange line there where you see that really sharp increase in cases that's the blue this fourth wave of what is it thinking to be mostly omicron deaths have not yet increased there but guys a lot of caveats to these deaths and severe disease both lag by several weeks, so we could just be seeing the early data and not yet seeing severe disease manifest we are also seeing a lot younger patients going into the hospital in South Africa and so of course we know that age is related with more severe disease as well older people are more vaccinated in South Africa but perhaps a glimmer of positive news if this trend holds guys hey meg can we talk about transmission because there was also two other um and again all anecdotal but a party that took place as I think you know in Oslo where effectively 120 people got it including some that weren't even part of the party who happened to go into the same room as the party like an hour after the party was over which to  some doctor seems to suggest it really does hang in the air and has it almost measles-like quality to from a transmissibility perspective similar story there was a party in Denmark where 150 people uh seem to have gotten it all at the same time yeah these are really scary things to hear about the number of people just getting infected these super-spreader events some of the world's first with omicron we just don't know yet if is it really is that much more transmissible the things that seem more firm are that it can reinfect people who've previously had covid more easily some folks are now talking about whether the time from infection to infectiousness is shorter with omicron which would make it more contagious in that way but more work is needed to be done on all of this and I don't think even all of those cases have been sequenced so we don't know that they're all omicron you know the expectation is many of them probably are but it's of course very frightening to hear about that level of contagiousness if is that is the case and then I in terms of severity one of the big questions especially around some data out of South Africa had been that it wasn't it wasn't affecting older people and we hadn't seen it in enough people for a long enough time to know whether we were going to get unfortunately to either hospitalizations or death or the like are we now at a point where we can, I mean either are we at that point or when will be at the point to actually be able to measure this properly yeah we're still only really in the first few weeks of this wave which is just remarkable to see how quickly the cases have gone up, so it will probably still be a few more weeks until we really see that there's also a marked difference in the vaccination rates among people over 50 and under 50 in South Africa and so perhaps that is playing a role here and if so does it show that the vaccines do provide protection which is something that we all really want to see we are expecting perhaps even as soon as the end of this week we could see the first lab data on how well the vaccines protect or at least neutralize the omicron.