Meanwhile in South Africa....
Cases reached more than 16,000 nationally, up from 2,300 a few days earlier
www.voanews.com
In the past week, cases have reached more than 16,000, up dramatically from 2,300 last Monday, according to South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases.
The NICD says the increase in cases in such a short period of time is “unprecedented” in the trajectory of the pandemic, now in its fourth phase in the country.
Hospitals in South Africa’s Gauteng province, which contains two of the country’s biggest cities, are packed with people infected with the omicron variant.
Doctors say most of the patients haven’t been vaccinated, and an alarming number of them are children under the age of five-years-old.
“There’s been a rather rapid rise in hospital admissions with patients who have COVID, whether they’re presenting with COVID pneumonia or severe COVID disease," Dr. Abdullah said.
“At this time, we think about 75% to 80% of hospitalizations are unvaccinated," he said. "It could be as large as 40% of the population that has not yet either been vaccinated or had a previous infection with coronavirus up until now,” he noted. “So, we have a large pool of people who can still present with overwhelming infection and severe disease,” he said.
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Personally if I had young kids now, I'd be having an anxiety attack.
The horrifying # is: 7x increase in cases in 1 week, mostly unvaxxed. Only 77% of eligible people in QC have been vaccinated, leaving 1.9M still vulnerable. If the ball gets rolling on Omicron...
BUT!!! At least the numbers show that the vaccinated are not getting hospitalized, which was a key concern of scientists when they announced Omicron a few days ago. So there's your ray of sunshine.
