Sage data suggests Omicron patients leave hospital sooner
From our UK edition
Recent Sage reports have stressed that we’re still waiting on a major piece of information: the average stay in hospital for Omicron patients. It could be a game-changer. If the stay halves, the Covid-handling capacity of the NHS doubles and the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed falls quite a lot. As SPI-M says in a note published on 23 Dec: 'A reduced length of stay would allow more capacity within hospitals to manage this, and, to a first approximation, this would scale linearly with the change, i.e. halving the length of stay would permit double the admissions.' Might this all-important figure already be available? A Sage paper dated 22 December had some distribution graphs showing how many days Covid patients were spending in hospital.
