Probably I should have said “likely would not predict ours well at all.”
I note that SA’s resolved cases CFR is over 2.7% AFTER Omicron (assuming Omicron is pretty well done there.) I can only estimate at best what that number was just B4 Omicron. 3.5%, maybe? That would lead toward the possibility that maybe Delta took out nearly all the fatally vulnerable (and likely to be exposed) people in SA before Omicron even popped up.
Something that is unrecognized is that we DO have a lot of people in the US in long term recovery from prior variants, and sometimes those recoveries regress. One of my wife’s best friends was readmitted to the hospital for COVID complications twice after going home: One of those readmissions was pretty serious. It took the friend a year before she could go outside in cold weather (Mid-South cold weather, not northern US cold weather). Obviously, with that kind of damage, things can go wrong...
That said, I don’t think that accounts for 2k+ fatalities a day. It’s probably significant, though. And I also note another oddity in SA’s numbers vs. ours: They show few unresolved cases. We have 30 million!
Something else, too: Even with increased likely underreporting of our Omicron cases, our Omicron case spike (area under curve including likely future cases) dwarfs our Delta case spike. SA’s Delta case curve area clearly beats out their Omicron curve. So... While Omicron’s raw infectiousness is much higher than Delta, in total, in SA, Omicron’s effective infectiousness over the course of the wave was LOWER than their Delta wave. This has a whole host of ramifications.
Then there is the issue of the younger, slimmer population remaining after Delta, and perhaps better natural resistance in it, even discounting the demographics, before any of this started.
I can go on. ;-)
Hmmm... Perhaps I should have said “SA’s overall experience in many ways is not predictive of ours.”
France, however, is quite interesting, in a tragic way. They are consistently running MORE fatalities from Omicron than Delta. Over double, now. :-(
I suggest a “relook”. Not that making that suggestion gives me any pleasure. :-(
France, as of 2 February 2022,
( 131,312 "worldometer official" deaths in France / 65,273,511 French population ) x 100 = 0.201 % mortality rate over two years of data.
Slightly more than two-tenths of one percent. In over two years since the Chinese provided the first data to Drosten in order to code the RT-PCR for Covid in January of 2020, two months BEFORE the WHO declared a pandemic.
Yeahnthays probably what is going on, folks with long term cases of,covid, and dying from it now that omicron is dominant.
I haven’t heard of France having high numbers of deaths from omicron? I’ll check again, but last I knew (awhile,back) the numbers were low deaths, high numbers of infections)
[That would lead toward the possibility that maybe Delta took out nearly all the fatally vulnerable (and likely to be exposed) people in SA before Omicron even popped up.]]
That could,very well be, good thought.