Denmark is roughly a week ahead of Canada in experiencing a wave of Omicron infections. Denmark can therefore offer us a preview of what we can expect to see soon in Canada.
Denmark is important for other reasons too. Unlike South Africa, Denmark has an older population, with an age demographic profile similar to Canada. Like Canada, and unlike either South Africa or the United Kingdom, Denmark has low levels of natural immunity in their population.
Like Canada, Denmark has a high vaccination rate: more than 90% of those 12 and over in Denmark have been vaccinated. Like Canada, most of those vaccinations have been with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
Perhaps most importantly, Denmark has done a way better job of tracking the spread of both the Delta and Omicron variants than Canada has. Their record-keeping is meticulous, and prompt.
Denmark's most recent report on Omicron can be found at:
https://files.ssi.dk/covid19/omikron/statusrapport/rapport-omikronvarianten-29122021-ub46
What can that report tell us? First, it has excellent information on the rate of spread of Omicron:
What does this report tell us? It tells us that Omicron went from 0.0% of cases on the 26th of November to 79.5% of cases four weeks later of December 22nd. Given the similarities between our two populations, Canada can expect that 80% of new COVID cases in Canada will be Omicron by around Wednesday, January 5th, if not before.
That 79.5% figure was extrapolated from 789 omicron cases out of the 992 COVID genomic sequencings done on December 22nd, which is the only practical way to obtain a reasonably accurate estimate of the incidence of Omicron quickly. If you wait until genomic sequencing is available for all cases, your estimates for the incidence of Omicron will be many days out of date - which is a crucial time lag on a variant that is doubling in numbers every few days. (There's a lot Canada could learn from Danish data tracking!)
There's also important data hidden in this table. If 79.5% of the 12,298 cases on December 22nd were Omicron, that means 20.5% - or 2,521 - were some other variant, almost certainly Delta. If you look back to November 25th when there were no omicron cases, there were 4,106 cases, almost entirely Delta. In other words, daily Delta cases in Denmark have dropped by almost 40 percent since Omicron first appeared on the scene - which could be wonderful news if that trend continues.
There's also important information in this report about who is becoming infected with Omicron:
You can see omicron just exploding over the three weeks shown. The age demographic most at risk is between the ages of 20 and 64. This gives us a good clue who will be most at risk in Canada.
Notice also that young children are catching omicron at a far lower rate than they are catching Delta. This mirrors the data seen in the UK. If we were willing to keep schools open during Delta, there is no reason to close schools for Omicron, especially when Omicron is milder than Delta.
This same report also contains good information on the health risks of Omicron. Earlier in the report we are told that 46,140 cases of Omicron have been determined by sequencing so far. That has resulted in the following hospitalizations:
Less than 5 people in ICUs in all of Denmark. That's a remarkably low number! No deaths are mentioned in the report, so we have to assume Denmark has not seen even one omicron-related death so far. (Deaths usually follow two to four weeks after initial infection, so it's early enough we should not make too much of the absence so far of deaths, particularly when omicron is primarily infecting a younger demographic, but it is nonetheless a hopeful sign.)
There's also information comparing hospitalization rates for Delta and Omicron during the same period:
We see that 0.7 percent of Omicron cases are requiring hospitalization as opposed to 1.1 percent of Delta cases, which indicates the rate of hospitalization is 36% less for Omicron.
Note also that one in seven omicron cases are becoming infected after entering the hospital. The report unfortunately doesn't tell us what proportion of Omicron cases were discovered with routine testing at admission to hospital for some other condition. If patients came into hospital for some other condition, or became infected after entering hospital, hospitalization doesn't necessarily indicate a severe level of illness. If there were a high number of hospitalized Omicron patients with severe illness we should not be seeing less than 5 Omicron patients in ICUs in the entire country!
Finally, there is the question of how much protection vaccination provides against catching Omicron.
An earlier Danish Government report from December 23rd provides data on this question:
https://files.ssi.dk/covid19/omikron/statusrapport/rapport-omikronvarianten-23122021-e4k6
We see that the rate of infection with Omicron among the unvaccinated is a little over a third what it is with Delta. (8.4% versus 23.8%) Given that the unvaccinated are about 8 percent of the age 12 and over population in Denmark, the unvaccinated are getting infected with Omicron at just about the same rate as the general population. We are most definitely NOT seeing a pandemic of the unvaccinated in terms of Omicron case numbers.
An amazing 77.2 percent of Omicron cases are among the fully vaccinated. Full Vaccination provides virtually no protection against catching omicron.
A further 12.7% of Omicron cases were fully vaccinated with booster shots. Given that roughly half of the over 12 population in Denmark has been given booster shots after full vaccination, that's roughly one quarter of the percentage of cases we would otherwise expect. Perhaps the best way to say it is that boosters reduce but do not eliminate the risk of infection with Omicron.
There's one last important piece of information in the above table. For at least a few weeks longer we will have a dual-track pandemic: part Delta and part Omicron. If you look at the above table you'll see that more than three-quarters of recent Delta cases were among the vaccinated.
All of the media hype in recent months about Delta being a 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' has been obscuring an important reality. Yes, the unvaccinated were being hospitalized and dying of Delta at a much higher rate than the vaccinated. But even before Omicron, the vaccinated have been more responsible for the spread of COVID than the unvaccinated, if only because there are so many more of them.
Part of the issue has to do with the relative effectiveness of track and trace programs. Denmark does a lot of follow-up of the close contacts of those with Delta, and tests all of those close contacts, which is part of how Denmark kept its cases and deaths so low during most of the COVID pandemic. Denmark has found most of those who were fully-vaccinated but had asymptomatic cases of Delta or cases so mild the person wouldn't otherwise seek testing, which has given them much more complete data on who was actually infected with Delta. Which leads to one final conclusion: Blaming the unvaccinated for the spread of Delta is not supported by a more complete tally of infections.
Update: The most recent Danish Government report, from 31st of December is at:
https://files.ssi.dk/covid19/omikron/statusrapport/rapport-omikronvarianten-31122021-ct18
Still showing only 93 Omicron cases in hospital and less than 5 in the ICU. Now 17.7% of Omicron cases were booster vaccinated and 72% fully vaccinated.
PS: It’s hard to get data on vaccination rates for just the over 12 population any more for Denmark. And vaccination rates, particularly for the single and triple vaccinated, are rapidly moving targets. With those caveats here’s a comparison of vaccination status against omicron infections:
What’s weird about the above table is how over-represented the fully vaccinated are. That could be because the unvaccinated and partially vaccinated are often younger and therefore have stronger immune systems than the older vaccinated. But if that were the case, how do we explain the fact that the large majority of Omicron cases are between the ages 15 and 50? I think it would be useful to do some lab research to see if vaccination is creating antibody dependent enhancement, or ADE. ADE happens when vaccination makes it easier for a virus to enter the body. I think there’s some possibility that full vaccination essentially opens a back-door entrance to the body for Omicron. Lab research could tell us if that is so.
PPS: Thus far, the mainstream media in Canada have shown a vast disinterest in what’s happening in Denmark, preferring to let you fly blind into the future. Expect more fear porn like this, which will tell you about field hospitals being set up for Omicron patients in London, without telling you that 80 percent of those Omicron patients only found out they had omicron after coming to hospital for other reasons, i.e., they are in hospital for other reasons and only incidentally infected with Omicron. I don’t know what the media’s agenda is, beyond scaring everyone into getting booster shots too late to do any good, but it’s clear that giving you accurate and timely information about Omicron is not a high priority.