Omicron: the troll variant
How the virus's latest incarnation taunts hospital systems into collapse
In past items we’ve taken a tour through Quebec’s SARS-CoV-2 numbers, both for the general population and the hospitalized. The province’s data collection practices have been anything but scientific, but at the close of 2021, we at least had numbers that made some sense compared to the same time a year ago.
It’s when you start to look at deaths that the data goes from dubious to otherworldly.
Hospitalizations are way up compared to last year:
But deaths in hospitals are dramatically down:
Taken together, hospital deaths are about 14% of what we would expect given our number of hospitalizations.
Did Quebec hospitals cure Covid, and forget to tell anyone?
An obvious complicating factor here is that it takes time to die, and the death figures have been trending up. Maybe it’s just the lag? But last year, hospital deaths peaked around the same time as hospitalizations themselves. And if the current weekly hospital deaths haven’t peaked yet, their growth is slowing down. Absent a correction of historical data, there’s no way these numbers will reach parity.
Another potential explanation would be found in the popular refrain, but now we have vaccines! Yes we do, and that’s already accounted for in the hospitalization rate. We’re talking about the death rate of people doing poorly enough to be hospitalized, whether they’re vaccinated or not. It’s low for everyone.
A final insufficient explanation would be the fact that about half of our so-called Covid hospitalizations are people in the hospital for some other cause. Perhaps their death rate is so low because we’ve included so many asymptomatic pregnant women, etc, in this hospitalization number? But again, it’s the comparison to last year that matters. Even if we assumed that all SARS-CoV-2 hospitalizations last year were actually for Covid, we’d still have only 28% of the expected number of hospital deaths currently, compared to last year. It would be bonkers to observe such a stark change in the death rate without looking for the cause.
Dying with SARS-CoV-2
Despite being so relatively low this year, the Covid death statistic is still subject to over-attribution. Like hospitalizations it’s the product of a PCR test rather than a medical diagnosis, as Quebec’s confiner-in-chief surprisingly explained last week:
Thus, all of our “Covid” statistics are best understood as viral positives found within certain populations: the general population, the hospitalized, and the dead. And as far as we’ve been told, the methodologies for these are the same this year as last year. So if the results are as different as they are, something else must have changed.
The final piece of this puzzle is SARS-CoV-2 deaths from outside hospitals.
In the past month, SARS-CoV-2 deaths have dramatically shifted away from hospitals and long term care (red), as well as retirement homes (orange), to the “home and unknown” category (green). Together, the total conveniently reaches the same height as a year ago. But how can people be dying so much more outside hospitals, and so much less inside them, when hospitalizations are higher than ever? It makes no sense.
Fortunately, there’s an explanation that fits all the oddities we’re seeing here: in its latest incarnation, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has infected a much larger chunk of the general population, the hospitalized population, and the dying population—and is killing almost no one.
We see a strong but incidental presence of the virus everywhere we look, as if we were asking the same people to flip a coin rather than take a PCR test. In deaths it’s showing up more at home than hospitals primarily because more people die outside hospitals than inside hospitals. The virus is just along for the ride. If we read into François Legault’s strangely reckless tweet quoted above, he knows this is happening.
Quebec hospitals are no longer in a Covid disease crisis, they are in a SARS-CoV-2 testing crisis. They are weighed down by procedures imposed in a time when the virus was, for whatever reason, associated with many more hospital deaths.
Now that the virus is spreading much further while doing much less individual harm, the costs of containment regulations in hospitals have multiplied while the benefits have been reduced to little or nothing. In the government’s desperation these rules have been whittled away over the past weeks, allowing “infected” health care workers to work. But the corrections have been too little and too late to stave off the chaos and terror caused by a variant that is—following the government’s own data—remarkably less dangerous.
One of the terrifying quirks of the old SARS-CoV-2 was that it could cause the immune system to critically damage the body with an overactive, and late, immune response. The new, mostly harmless to humans SARS-CoV-2 seems to have pulled a similar trick—on Quebec’s hospital system.