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Covid Hospital Admissions Drop for 22nd Day in a Row – But New Variants in South Africa Raise Questions of What Comes Next

by Will Jones
3 May 2022 9:51 PM

Latest Covid hospital data show there were 1,198 new admissions with Covid in the U.K. on April 27th (60% of which were incidental), which marked a 19% decrease on the previous week and a fall for the 22nd day in a row, as the Omicron BA.2 wave continues to decline. However, news of a rise in reported infections and hospital admissions in South Africa linked to new variants has raised questions of what might come next. MailOnline has more.

A delay to the Government’s dashboard update on bank holiday Monday means today’s stats include four days’ worth of numbers – after ministers stopped publishing the figures on weekends following ‘Freedom Day’.

It shows there were 35,635 new positive Covid tests over the last four days, working out at an average of just 8,900 daily cases since Friday. There were also 407 total deaths, equivalent of just over 100 daily.

Case numbers logged by the central testing scheme are becoming increasingly unreliable now that free swabs have been stopped for the vast majority of Britons. 

Meanwhile, latest Covid hospital data show there were 1,198 new admissions for the virus on April 27th, which marked a near-19% decrease on the previous week. 

Daily hospitalisations have now fallen for 22 days in a row – despite NHS leaders calling for masks and outdoor mixing to return just weeks ago.

Pressure is mounting on the U.K. to scrap its daily Covid stats after Ireland said it would discontinue its updates in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, South Africa has once again become a focal point of the pandemic amid a fresh Covid surge of new subvariants. Covid cases have nearly quadrupled in a month nationally and hospital admissions are ticking up in Gauteng province, the former epicentre of the original Omicron wave. 

The world watched in horror last November as the super-infectious Omicron strain (BA.1) spread through South Africa at unprecedented speed – which turned out to be mild. But now the country finds itself at the cusp of a fresh explosion in infections, this time due to sub-strains that appear even more transmissible and resistant to antibodies.

Researchers on the ground in South Africa say the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants can evade immunity and cause symptoms in people who were infected with their parent strain just months ago. What is still unclear is whether the new wave will create milder or more severe illness — but experts tell MailOnline the former is more likely, for the U.K. at least.

South Africa skipped the Omicron BA.2 wave, but is now the first with the new subvariants – though this is unlikely to do much more than create a new wave (or ripple) of mostly sniffles.

There has also been a lull in infections since the original Omicron wave collapsed in South Africa in January, whereas the U.K.’s case rates spiralled again over spring.

There are now nearly 4,800 new Covid infections per day in South Africa, on average, compared to around 1,300 this time last month. Nationally there are about 1,400 weekly daily hospital admissions for the virus, broadly unchanged from a month ago, but it takes several weeks for any trend to play out. In Gauteng province, home to Johannesburg, admissions have doubled in a month.

However, more than 90% of South Africans are estimated to have natural immunity against Covid, which could limit the pressure on hospitals.

Professor [Paul] Hunter told MailOnline he expects BA.4 and BA.5 to become dominant in the U.K. unless another completely new variant arises.

“I suspect that unless something else comes along, one or both of these variants will become dominant in the UK but I can’t predict how big a surge of infections that would lead to,” he said.

“It is also likely that we will still have robust protection against severe disease for most of us.”

Worth reading in full.

Tags: Hospital AdmissionsNew VariantOmicron BA.2Omicron BA.4Omicron BA.5Omicron VariantSouth Africa

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40 Comments
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transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago

Thanks for this.

29
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

I quite like the idea of a law that makes it clear that large social media platforms are NOT publishers but “common carriers” not responsible for content, and that forces them NOT to “moderate” content as a condition of their being allowed to operate.

30
-1
AJPotts
AJPotts
1 year ago

The European Union is intent on the destruction of freedom, democracy, and of the nation state and the imposition of authoritarian technocratic rule. It was always thus. This country’s political class will do all it can to bring the UK back under EU control.

46
0
JohnK
JohnK
1 year ago
Reply to  AJPotts

There will be a lot of copy cat activity, with the senior bureaucrats all being in the same club. Not really independent, and they all tend to do the same thing – just some editing and adjusting the numbers a bit etc.

7
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
1 year ago

Off -T.

Well lookee here. The Torygraph have finally caught up with reality. Finally they are accepting what I have been posting about for a couple of years – we are being pushed as a nation in to indebtedness deliberately.

The “UK For Sale” notices will be going up soon. Tantalising, will it be before or after the election?

16
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
1 year ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

It would help if you posted the bloody link hux!

Whoops 😀

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/22/the-bank-of-england-is-pushing-britain-into-bankruptcy/

13
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago

More accurate climate predictions from “experts”, Radio Times 1974, The Ice Age Cometh

🤔 : LockdownSceptics (reddit.com)

11
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago

Francis Hoar, the anti-lockdown barrister, wrote a great paper a few years ago which used to be available in PDF but I can no longer find. It can be read in full here: In Protection of Freedom of Speech, a legal analysis by Francis Hoar. – Workers of England Union It touches on protections for employees and also online censorship. Worth reading in full. Specifically regarding online censorship it proposes this: “Thus, this Report proposes that websites that host organic material should have a legal obligation to retain all content unless they consider, on investigation, that a statement contravenes either the criminal or the civil law.” – pages from 38 onwards go into more detail.

11
0
Ian Rons
Ian Rons
1 year ago

Interesting article. A few points.

Firstly, platforms already restrict content in certain regions/countries, and have done for years. Things that are banned in, say, India are still shown in the US and other countries. It’s still possible for X/Twitter to show content in the US that it doesn’t show in the EU. Whether they will actually do that in the case of this kind of content is another matter, but technically they could and currently do so for some content, I believe.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, there are right-wing/libertarian moves afoot to apply some form of “public accommodation” law to bear on social media platforms in the US, if they take a monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic form. This would essentially bar platforms from censoring on the basis of content (see Thomas’ concurrence in Biden v Knight, and I’d also refer you to the Journal of Free Speech Law vol 1, issue 1 passim, and Principles for a Free Society by Richard A. Epstein). That’s the current avenue being explored to deal with these issues, and I think you’d be better off looking in that direction.

Thirdly, you argue for the US Congress to pass a novel law criminalising US companies that “collaborate” with foreign governments to restrict the speech of US citizens. This raises interesting constitutional questions, and arguably such a law could (ironically) be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. While Congress can sanction companies because of their activities in foreign markets for a variety of reasons, a company’s speech rights (which includes what to edit/censor inside the US and in other territories based on what other governments require) may trump all of that (this current complaint in DC District Court argues as much, albeit from a different perspective).

Personally, I don’t see how such a law would work, because ultimately you’d be trying to compel speech from companies, i.e. forcing them to publish speech in foreign countries when they may not want to (and the govt currently can’t do this inside the US because of s.230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 and current case law, although a close reading of s.230 might suggest otherwise, as Trump argued). This is fundamentally different from telling a company they can’t trade in a sanctioned country. I think it might very well be possible (and there’s presumably case law on this) to sanction a US company for publishing any content, regardless of the type of content, in a designated foreign country; but we are not talking about content-neutral restrictions (which allow for “time, manner and place” restrictions on speech, e.g. prohibiting a loudspeaker at 3am in the town square), so the full 1A comes into play. I’d like to hear an analysis of all this from a US legal scholar!

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Rons
4
-2

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