afransen
Senior Member
Testing will get swamped and the numbers will become meaningless.
Testing will get swamped and the numbers will become meaningless.
Not yet. Hospitalizations are still low. Out of 18 million Ontarians we have 452 people in hospital due to Covid, compared with 987 on Dec 24, 2020. Get your booster, maintain distancing and masking and we‘ll get through this.We are already boned.
Hospitalizations, ICUs and deaths are the gauges to measure how we‘re doing here, not cases.
Fair point, and I can agree that case counts in relation to hospitalizations is the most useful metric.Yes and no. Hospitalization is driven from #cases x probability of hospitalization.
We may see a cull of the eligible yet willfully unvaccinated. All things considered, and especially since we’re in this mess still in large part because of them, I’m mostly okay with it.
I agree with your views on those willfully unvaccinated - however the issue is if omnicron spreads to many people, it also has many more hosts where it could mutate. Increased transmissibility with the same lethality of Delta would be disasterous, if it goes that direction. We're lucky Omnicron appears less lethal...but that doesn't mean this is the final evolution of the virus. Unfortunately, given the global-nature of this pandemic, many can't get vaccinated in developing countries, where it's fertile breeding ground for mutations...
We already know vaccines work, the test will be if they work well enough in reducing the severity of illness in those vaccinated to cope with far more people (many vaccinated or already with immunity due to an earlier infection) testing positive but NOT getting ill enough to need hospitalisation. I think the jury is still out on that but the evidence from several studies points to YES.As of Dec 24, 2021: Hospitalized 508, ICU 164, https://covid-19.ontario.ca/
And for some perspective: Dec 24, 2020: Hospitalized 987, ICU 277.
If we don’t see a significant rise in either hospitalizations or ICU as cases skyrocket we can assume the vaccines are working. We should know within the next two weeks after everyone’s high risk holiday behaviour comes home to roost.
That was my point.…the test will be if the vaccines work well enough in reducing the severity of illness in those vaccinated to cope with far more people (many vaccinated or already with immunity due to an earlier infection) testing positive but NOT getting ill enough to need hospitalisation.