NEW YORK (AP) – For two years, coronavirus case counts and hospitalisations have been widely used barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world.

But the Omicron wave is making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organisations to rethink the way they report such figures.

“It’s just a data disaster,” said staff writer Katherine Wu, who covers COVID-19 for The Atlantic magazine.

The number of case counts soared over the holidays, an expected development given the emergence of a variant more transmissible than its predecessors.

Yet these counts only reflect what is reported by health authorities.

They do not include most people who test themselves at home, or are infected without even knowing about it. Holidays and weekends also lead to lags in reported cases.

If you could add all those numbers up – and you can’t – case counts would likely be substantially higher.

For that reason, The Associated Press (AP) has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasising case counts in stories about the disease.

That means, for example, no more stories focussed solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable.

Throughout the media, there has been more caution in use of official case counts.

An NBC News story on Monday about the skyrocketing number of COVID cases relied on a one-week average of case counts. A Tuesday story simply referred to a “tidal wave” of cases.

During its coverage of a Senate hearing with health experts on Tuesday, the case counts CNN flashed onscreen were two-week averages. MSNBC used a variety of measurements, including a listing of the five states with highest reported numbers over the past three days.

On its website’s ‘Guide to the Pandemic’, The Washington Post used a seven-day average of cases and compared that number to last Tuesday’s, showing a 56 per cent increase. The New York Times used a daily count in an online chart, yet also included a two-week trend in both cases and deaths.

An AP story on Saturday by Jennifer Sinco Kelleher and Terry Tang headlined, Omicron explosion spurs nationwide breakdown of services was full of statistics from across the United States on hospitalisation rates or employees calling out sick from work. The case count metric was not used.

“We definitely wanted people to go a little deeper and be more specific in reporting,” said news editor Josh Hoffner, who helps oversee AP’s virus coverage.

Many news organisations are debating how best to use statistics now during the Omicron surge, Wu said. But there are no easy answers.

“It’s how journalism works,” Wu said. “We need the data. We need to show receipts to readers. But I try to do it carefully.”

Hospitalisation and death rates are considered by some to be a more reliable picture of COVID-19′s current impact on society.

Yet even the usefulness of those numbers has been called into question in recent days.
In many cases, hospitalisations are incidental: there are people being admitted for other reasons and are surprised to find they test positive for COVID, said senior editor for health and medicine at Scientific American Tanya Lewis.

Despite the imperfections, case counts should not be ignored, said Gary Schwitzer, a University of Minnesota School of Public Health instructor and publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, which monitors health coverage in the media.

The numbers illustrate trends, giving a picture of which areas of the country are being hit particularly hard or where the surge may have peaked, he said.

They can predict broader societal impacts, like where hospitals are about to be slammed or where there will be worker shortages.

“These are stories that may not be told adequately if only hospitalisations and deaths are emphasised,” Schwitzer said. That’s a point emphasised in AP’s internal guidance, as well.

“They do have value,” Hoffner said. “We don’t want people to eliminate mention of case counts.”

There are some in public health and journalism who believe the current surge – painful as it is – may augur good news. It could be a sign that COVID-19 is headed toward becoming an endemic disease that people learn to live with, rather than being a disruptive pandemic, wrote David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu in The New York Times.

But if the past two years have taught anything, it’s about the danger in predictions, Lewis said.

“We’ve been surprised time and again,” she said. “We don’t know everything about the course of the pandemic. We still need to be humble and keep an open mind in terms of where things are going.”

NORWICH, ENGLAND (CNA) – As soon as Omicron was first identified in Botswana and South Africa, two key questions arose: Whether this new variant was more infectious

than earlier ones, and whether it caused more or less severe disease.
It’s clear from how rapidly the variant has spread and how quickly cases have increased that it is more infectious. But the question of whether Omicron has less harmful effects

than previous variants – whether it is less “virulent” – is somewhat more complex.
Early results from South Africa (which are still awaiting review) suggested that patients with Omicron were less likely to be admitted to hospital than before.

And research found that even when admitted, people were less likely to require oxygen, need mechanical ventilation, be admitted to intensive care or die.

But South Africa has a young population compared to much of the world. A relative lack of older, more vulnerable people catching the virus may have been masking the variant’s capabilities. Whether Omicron would also cause milder illness in other countries was initially unclear.

However, information accrued over the past month has shown that South Africa’s experience isn’t an anomaly. Data from most European countries, including the United Kingdom (UK), supports the suggestion that Omicron is generally causing less severe disease than previous variants.

This is most clearly seen in the recent trajectory of the epidemic in Britain. Analysis by the UK Health Security Agency suggests that Omicron is only about a third as likely to lead to a hospital admission compared to the delta variant.

Of course, if daily Omicron infections rise to a very high number, as they have, then hospitalisations will also rise. In the final few days of 2021, hospital admissions of COVID-positive people increased quite substantially, but still didn’t surpass levels seen during previous waves.

And critically, we haven’t yet seen the number of patients occupying mechanical ventilation beds start to rise.

Several different factors might explain why this is happening. First up, there’s immunity.
It could be that prior immunity – which thanks to previous infections and vaccination programmes is now much more common across many parts of the world than in previous waves – is sufficient to reduce rates of severe disease.

For protection against an initial infection, located in the nose and throat, antibodies against a key part of the coronavirus’s outer structure – its spike protein – appear to play the greatest role.

However, these wane over time. Plus, many of the mutations found on Omicron affect the spike protein, and so are likely to impair the antibodies’ ability to bind to the virus, reducing the effectiveness of a vaccine or prior infection at preventing new infections.
But for protection against a more severe infection, which tends to be located in the lungs, other immune responses could be playing a more dominant role, such as killer T cells.

These are a type of white blood cell that kills foreign substances as well as the body’s own cells that have been infected with the virus.

And early research, yet to be reviewed by scientists, suggests that Omicron has very few mutations to the parts of the virus that T cells target. This implies that immunity built up in the past that’s potentially more effective against severe disease should still largely be intact.

This could be a powerful explanation as to why Omicron’s virulence appears lower. In the UK, for example, it’s estimated that close to 95 per cent of adults have some form of immunity to the virus through vaccination or infection.

But might Omicron also be intrinsically less virulent than previous variants, even in those with no prior immunity? This is more difficult to be certain of, though there are some signs that suggest it might be.

Firstly, Omicron has several mutations near to a part of its structure called the furin cleavage site, which is thought to play a role in virulence.

In laboratory experiments where the virus’ furin cleavage site was deleted, the virus showed reduced growth in human respiratory cells and caused less severe disease in laboratory animals.

It’s plausible that the mutations around the furin cleavage site could explain some of the reduced virulence of Omicron.

Several groups have also studied the ability of Omicron (or a similar pseudovirus) to grow in tissue cells. These studies – which are also awaiting review – report that the virus grows less well in lung tissue but better in the tissue of the upper airway compared to previous variants.

Enhanced growth in the upper airway could lead to more virus being shed through the nose and mouth, which might help explain in part why Omicron is more infectious.

And given that infection of the lungs, rather than the upper respiratory tract, is what’s associated with more severe disease, the reduced ability of the variant to grow in the lungs could also be an important factor in explaining reduced virulence.

Overall, whatever the mechanism, the evidence that Omicron is causing less severe disease than previous variants is now adding up. But this doesn’t mean we should see it as less of a threat.