Coronavirus: The epidemic has peaked in Hungary, will the omicron bring the 5th wave?
Last week, in line with our expectations, the number of cases peaked in the 4th wave of the epidemic, and the number of cases is expected to decrease next week, wrote Gábor Vattay, head of the Department of Complex Systems Physics at Eötvös Loránd University, in an analysis sent to Portfolio. The figure below shows the weekly moving average of the number of cases expected for the next three weeks:
At Christmas, the number of cases per day can still be around 3,000. The big question is whether the numbers will continue to fall after that, or similarly to the United States – they will stabilize at a high level. We will be able to say this next week, from data from the three Baltic states that are already ahead of us in the delta wave, and this has happened somewhat in recent days with a decrease in the number of cases.
In terms of deaths, we saw an increase even this week. According to Gábor Vattay, the reason for this is that the change in the growth rate of deaths is one week behind the change in the number of cases. The following figure shows the weekly growth rate of the case numbers (green) relative to the growth rate of the deaths (red) offset by one week. (Day 0 is today, December 3.)
It is clear from this that the stagnation of the number of cases a week ago at + 20% is now in the mortality rate, which was also 15-20% this week. The peak of deaths is thus expected by the end of next week, following the trend of the number of cases.
However, Gábor Vattay points out that the expected number of deaths in this wave will jump sharply due to the delay in the deaths. Assuming the current wave subsides completely, the model now predicts more than 12,000 deaths, which will not be far behind the proportion of the population affected by the delta wave in Romania.
The new variant, omicron, does not yet affect the dynamics of the epidemic. It is worth noting about this variant that the number of cases in South Africa is doubling every 5-7 days. At present, Hungary has not yet officially sequenced the omicron variant, so there can be only a few omicron cases, and approx. 10 doubling cycles (a thousandfold increase) must take place to become significant in Hungary as well. It takes 50-70 days, so this may become an acute problem in Hungary at the beginning of February at the earliest – Gábor Vattay points out.
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