Preliminary SA data appear to show shorter hospital stays, but still not conclusive

Initial data from a major hospital centre in South Africa at the centre of the new wave of Covid-19 brought on by the Omicron variant appear to show that patients require less medical care.

There were 166 new admissions to the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital Complex in Pretoria between 14 and 29 November with 42 patients now in its Covid wards.

Of interest, the majority of those admitted initially sought treatment for illnesses not related to Covid-19 but were found to be infected following testing needed for admission.

Nevertheless, the author of the paper describing the initial experience at the complex, Fareed Abdullah, a director at South Africa's Medical Research Council, cautioned that: "clinical profile of admitted patients could change significantly over the next two weeks, by which time we can draw conclusions about the severity of disease with greater precision."

The data available thus far only covered the first two weeks of the latest wave.

Of the 38 adults in the Covid wards as of 2 December, six had been vaccinated, 24 were not and the status of the remainder was unknown.

Some 19% of the admissions had been children up to the age of nine and 28% had ages 30-39.

Ten patients, or 6.6%, died, but the omicron was not determined to have been the cause. The proportion of deaths during the 18 months prior was at 23%. For now however, the low number of deaths might be the result of the "usual lag" between cases and deaths.

No Covid-related deaths were recorded among the 34 admissions to the pediatric Covid wards over the last two weeks, versus 17% over the preceding 18 months, although two more weeks of data were needed in order to have sufficient data.

"The relatively low number of COVID-19 pneumonia hospitalizations in the general, high care and ICU wards constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves." But more data was needed. What was clear however was the different age profile in comparison to previous waves, possibly because 57% of people in the province of Gauteng had been vaccinated, versus 34% for those aged 18-49.

The average length of the stays in Covid wards was 2.8 days, down from 8.5 days over the preceding 18 months. A similarly shorter length of stay was reported for all hospitals in Tshwane, the NICD said in its latest weekly report.