Here are the Dashboard stats from the 1/14/22 Mountain Mail:
Chaffee Covid-10 stats:
7-day case count: 302
14-day case count: 457
Positivity rate: n/a
Hospitalizations: 3
Pandemic Total: 2,951
Deaths due to Covid-19: 29
Vaccines administered: 33,384
Full immunization rate: 73.8%
Additional data from the State of Colorado Covid-19 dashboard:
Chaffee County one-week cumulative incidence: 1,922
Chaffee County one-week cumulative incidence: 25.77%
Chaffee County two-week average positivity rate: 27.6
Comments:
Cases have doubled in the last week, but hospitalization is still less than 1% of total reported cases.
Positivity rate increased from 7.07% on 1/7/22 to 27.6% on 1/14/22
Published reports say 60-80% of Omicron cases are asymptomatic
Published reports say only 40% of symptomatic people report to public health
This would mean that instead of the 302 reported cases, there are:
an additional 755 symptomatic unreported cases
an additional 1133 asymptomatic cases
this calculates to 1888 total cases in Chaffee County in the last week
and approximately 3000 total cases in the last two weeks.
Even if this rate of Omicron infection continues, after 2-3 weeks, there should be a precipitous drop in infection. Chaffee County only has 20,000 people. In 2-3 weeks, there will be nobody left to infect!
We should also be heartened that with 3000 estimated cases in the last two weeks, there only 3 hospitalizations. As always, they do not tell us whether these 3 are in the hospital with Covid or from Covid. In any case, 3/3000 is a 1 in 1000 chance of hospitalization from Omicron using the assumptions above. Delta is also still circulating, so it is also possible that some of the hospitalized are from Delta.
Take home lesson: Omicron is not causing much hospitalization, and is blowing through the population very quickly, as anticipated. People will continue to get sick, but many are asymptomatic. In 2-3 weeks, everything should be back to near normal. Whatever normal is.
These are my own calculations, but I thought people would find it interesting.