SWPRS | 14 Dec 2021
In our recent analysis on The Return of the Flu, SPR noted that, despite very high coronavirus infection rates and the end of the Delta wave in late October, the flu had not yet returned to Latin America. Just two weeks later, Rio de Janeiro confirmed the beginning of a major flu wave.
It will now be very interesting to see if this development will lead to a global collapse of coronavirus predominance, or if regions with low natural immunity rates – including parts of Europe, some US states, China, Australia and New Zealand – will remain coronavirus territory.
Meanwhile, new data from Denmark indicates that, in countries with low natural coronavirus immunity rates, there appear to be no significant differences between the Omicron and Delta variants in terms of hospitalizations. As suspected, a variant achieving viral loads high enough to displace Delta was unlikely to have substantially lower virulence.
Of course, the total hospitalization rate is still only 0.8%, and not 50%, as large parts of the population apparently still believe, thanks to two years of horrendous media fearmongering.
