The Minister of Health officially announced an urgent measure that was decided for Romanians all over the country in full wave 5 of infections generated by the Omicron and Delta variants, the authorities wanting to find out which of them generates the serious cases admitted to ATI.
The Minister of Health says that from next week a sequencing of the people hospitalized in the ATI wards will begin in order to know how many of them are infected with the new strain of COVID-19, or with the old one, in order to clearly know which is generating the cases more serious.
"Next week we will do an extensive sequencing for the patients in the ATI wards so that we can see if these patients are infected with the Delta variant, or Omicron, because from what we know based on the sequencing so far, the Delta variant continues to circulate in Romania, and our opinion is that a good part of the serious cases are still produced by it.
From the point of view of the proportion of cases, probably 80% are with the Omicron variant, but the 20% of the Delta variant produce more serious illnesses that result in deaths. We are close to the top of wave 5, the date we estimate is somewhere around February 10-15, then the trend will probably reverse, so we have another week and a half, two.
The Omicron variant is transmitted much more easily even to vaccinated people, and there are countries like Portugal where 91% of the population is vaccinated, and they have more cases than us, with a population that is halved. However, we must note one thing, the percentage of admissions to the hospital, including ATI, is significantly higher than theirs, and this is how vaccination is justified.
Serious cases and deaths occur about 8 times more frequently in unvaccinated serious people, compared to vaccinated ones, and then obviously, at least those who are elderly, vulnerable, should take this aspect into account in order to be safe in this period.
There are 10 times fewer deaths compared to the previous wave, we are at an average of 50-60 daily deaths, then it reached over 500 at the peak of wave 4, with 18.000 daily cases. Now we are at 30.000 cases, but the proportion of deaths is much lower."
