Market comment 2021

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South Africa has reported data on Covid cases driven by the Omicron variant that appears to give added impetus to claims the country is experiencing a lower severity of disease. “In South Africa, this is the epidemiology: Omicron is behaving in a way that is less severe,” said Prof Cheryl Cohen of the country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), one of the authors of the study. “Compellingly, together our data really suggest a positive story of a reduced severity of Omicron compared to other variants,” she said during a news conference by a group of NICD scientists on Wednesday. Scientists, however, cautioned that the reasons less severe cases were being seen was not fully understood and that South Africa’s experience – with a young population – might not translate into how other countries experience Omicron.

 South African data suggests Omicron outbreak has caused less severe disease | Coronavirus | The Guardian

• Some good news at last but one might still wait for these results to translate to other countries, which is not guaranteed.
  
• And some less good news, often forgotten:
  

Long Covid did return to the news last week, with the publication of data from a multi-centre study suggesting that fewer than 30% of patients hospitalised with acute Covid had fully recovered a year later. It’s a stark statistic – yet this study did not account for the significant number of us who were never admitted to hospital, and have still not fully recovered. The most recent ONS data from October reports that 1.2 million people are living with long Covid (in hospitalised and non-hospitalised patients); 36% of those have had it for more than a year, with greatest prevalence in health and social care workers, and people living in more deprived areas.

 More than a million of us are suffering with long Covid – yet still it’s not taken seriously | Joanna Herman | The Guardian