Qatar Coronavirus Updates - Omicron Wave Continues

 Daily community cases continue to climb, 2 days ago it was 2,800, yesterday was 3,000 and today is 3,300. I think today's was a record for the entire pandemic in Qatar, not surprising since Omicron is breaking case records wherever it goes. Over 550 people are hospital and 51 in the ICU, one person in their 60s died today. What worries me is the delay between hospitalizations and deaths, in New York data showed that hospitalizations peaked two weeks after the cases, and ICU 18 days later. That might mean in terms of hospitalizations we are only seeing the beginning. However over 90% of the eligible population in Qatar is vaccinated so that should help, if vaccinated people with Omicron wind up in hospital it is typically for only 1-2 days so hospitals have a high turnover of patients (50-90 are entering hospital every day, but overall numbers are increasing by 10-30).

The detected cases are surely an underreporting of the actual figures. Not because the Government is manipulating the data but (1) due to issues with delays in getting PCR tests many people are using in-home rapid tests, but if they are positive then the Government wouldn't know unless it was reported to them and (2) Omicron is milder so many more people are asymptomatic and don't even realize that they have Covid.  I know of people in both categories and in the latter case they only knew when they went to a clinic for something else and the clinic tested them as part of protocol. They felt totally fine and had no idea they had Covid.

Qatar has announced new guidelines for testing, now most returning travelers can do a rapid test instead of a PCR, and in other cases people don't need PCR tests anymore. This is to relieve the burden on the testing facilities as they are under strain and have a huge backlog of tests. My recent PCR result (negative) took over four days. By then if you had Omicron you'd probably know and have mostly recovered.

So we do not appear to be at the peak yet. It could be another 1-2 weeks of case increases until things start to decline.