The dangers right here for older persons are scary: A charge of 0.45 p.c, as an illustration, interprets into roughly a 1 in 220 likelihood of dying for a vaccinated 75-year-old girl who contracts Covid. If the dangers stay close to these ranges with Omicron, they might result in tens of hundreds of U.S. deaths, and lots of extra hospitalizations.
Encouragingly, there are causes to imagine that Omicron’s dying charge could also be decrease. Three new research launched yesterday urged that Omicron causes milder sickness on common than earlier variations of the virus. “I would guess that the mortality risk with Omicron is much smaller” than with earlier variants, Dr. George Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, informed me yesterday.
One reassuring comparability is to a standard seasonal flu. The common dying charge amongst Americans over age 65 who contract the flu has ranged between 1 in 75 and 1 in 160 in recent times, based on the C.D.C. Pre-Omicron variations of Covid, in different phrases, appear to current dangers of an analogous order of magnitude to vaccinated individuals as a typical flu. Some years, a flu an infection could also be extra harmful.
With Omicron, “I think the risk is not super high for relatively healthy and boosted people in their 70s,” Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist on the University of Washington, informed me. “I think it’s moderate at most.”
Still, Baseman and different specialists advocate vigilance, for a number of causes. First, the flu kills tens of hundreds of Americans a 12 months, and we should always most likely pay extra consideration to it. (After declining final 12 months throughout social distancing, flu infections are rising once more now, as these Times charts present.)
Second, Omicron is so contagious that it has the potential to swamp hospitals and trigger many in any other case preventable deaths even when solely a small share of infections are extreme. “We’re not at a place to treat this as a cold,” Azra Ghani of Imperial College London mentioned.
Baseman mentioned that if she have been in her 70s, her major fear could be getting reasonably unwell, needing commonplace medical care and never having the ability to get it at an overwhelmed hospital. Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania informed me, “There is a strong rationale for reasonable efforts to mitigate transmission, particularly over the next four weeks.”