South Africa says that it has passed its fourth wave of cases, and counts few added deaths.
Source: New York Times
The South African government said Thursday that data from its health department suggested that the country had passed its Omicron peak without a major spike in deaths, offering cautious hope to other countries grappling with the variant. “The speed with which the Omicron-driven fourth wave rose, peaked and then declined has been staggering,” said Fareed Abdullah of the South African Medical Research Council. “Peak in four weeks and precipitous decline in another two. This Omicron wave is over in the city of Tshwane.
It was a flash flood more than a wave.” The rise in deaths over the period was small, and in the last week, officials said, “marginal.” Some scientists were quick to forecast the same pattern elsewhere. “We’ll be in for a tough January, as cases will keep going up and peak, and then fall fast,” said Ali Mokdad, a University of Washington epidemiologist who is a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist. While cases will still overwhelm hospitals, he said, he expects that the proportion of hospitalized cases will be lower than in earlier waves. Omicron, bearing dozens of troubling mutations, was first identified in Botswana and South Africa in late November.
It rapidly became dominant in South Africa, sending case counts skyrocketing to a pandemic peak averaging more than 23,000 cases a day by mid-December, according to the Our World in Data project at Oxford University. As of last week, Omicron appeared in 95 percent of all new positive test samples that were genetically sequenced. It has spread to more than 100 countries, infecting previously vaccinated and previously infected people, and its proliferation has strained hospitals and thinned work forces in countries like the United States and Britain. In South Africa, overall case counts have been falling for two weeks, plummeting 30 percent in the last week to an average of less than 11,500 a day.
Confirmed cases declined in all provinces except Western Cape and Eastern Cape, the data showed, and there was a drop in hospitalizations in all provinces except Western Cape. There are many caveats. The case figures might have been distorted by reduced testing during the holiday season. And many people in the most affected area had some measure of immunity, either from vaccination, prior infection or both, that might have protected them from serious illness. However, research teams in South Africa, Scotland and England have found that Omicron infections more often result in mild illness than earlier variants of the coronavirus, causing fewer hospitalizations.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/12/30/world/omicron-covid-vaccine-tests/south-africa-omicron-decline
There is another "caveat" with South Africa vs other countries (including the U.S.) and that is that they had the Beta variant that was prevalent before Delta and then Omicron whereas the U.S. and Europe had Alpha as the dominant variant before Delta and now Omicron.
We will have to see but I know that here in Philly, the hospitals are starting to fill, the positivity rate has gone from under 5% before Thanksgiving to 25% a month later. The deaths have also started rising although I don't know if some are due to reconciled data to "re-home" people who died in other counties/states, etc., and that data was finally forwarded here due to their actual residency being here in Philly.
We have blown past every peak of daily cases from last year and early this year, although i also know due to the holidays and people wanting to make sure before visiting with relatives and friends, as well as all kinds of restrictions put in place requiring testing before doing certain things, the testing rate is much higher. None of the results for cases is including the home kits that do antigen testing, although I expect most people who get a positive with a home antigen kit would probably try to get a PCR followup to confirm, and the results of that PCR would get counted.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Unfortunately people in the U.S. think that only Australia is "down under" when you have dozens of countries that are "below the equator" including 3/4 of the continent of South America and at least 1/3rd of the continent of Africa.
All of them are about to start summer.
(Delta has been insane
)I know that Beta (which was originally identified in South Africa) never really caught hold much anywhere else but there (and that region), whereas Alpha was the biggy most everywhere else.
Beta is the dark purple at the very top of the above with Alpha shown just under it in dark blue.
I think the issue with the vaccines and Omicron has to do with what the vaccines were designed to target (the spikes) and these "spikes" are really just long strings of proteins that obviously aren't "rigid". They will continually expand and contract and move around and "fold over", which makes it difficult for the immune system's various entities to actually get to the places they were created to attach to on the virus (notably along the spikes) to start neutralizing and clearing it. I.e., the stuff at the top of the spike, which is used as claws to attach to a cell, is just "matted" (my term 
) and can be hard for antibodies and T-cells to access to take the thing out (by keeping it from attaching to cells) -
They also found that Omicron had slightly different preferred "landing sites" (just before getting into the actual lung tissue - i.e., the "bronchioles" ) to start replicating from, and that was producing slightly different symptoms -
When I was running SETI@Home (with a team) for the 20 years the project was going on, for part of that time, we were also running Folding@Home that was using our machines with their client to do calculations of protein folding - https://foldingathome.org/home/
Of course now they are literally neck-deep in this very thing for SARS-CoV-2 (and other diseases) - https://foldingathome.org/
There was one image that had been shown in a Nature article about how the virus lands on and pulls itself to cells so that it can break through the cell wall, inject its genetic material, and start replicating. This was just scientifically fascinating (as horrible as the result is) -
