Projection of Healthcare Demand in Germany and Switzerland Urged by Omicron Wave (January-March 2022)

Abstract

After the implementation of broad vaccination programs, there is an urgent need to understand how the population immunity affects the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in presence of the protection waning and of the emergence of new variants of concern. In the current Omicron wave that is propagating across Europe, assessing the risk of saturation of the healthcare systems is crucial for pandemic management, as it allows us to support the transition towards the endemic course of SARS-CoV-2 and implement more refined mitigation strategies that shield the most vulnerable groups and protect the healthcare systems. We investigated the current pandemic dynamics by means of compartmental models that describe the age-stratified social-mixing, and consider vaccination status, vaccine types, and their waning efficacy. Our goal is to provide insight into the plausible scenarios that are likely to be seen in Switzerland and Germany in the coming weeks and help take informed decisions. Despite the huge numbers of new positive cases, our results suggest that the current wave is unlikely to create an overwhelming healthcare demand: owing to the lower hospitalization rate of the novel variant and the effectiveness of the vaccines. Our findings are robust with respect to the plausible variability of the main parameters that govern the severity and the progression of the Omicron infection. In a broader context, our framework can be applied also to future endemic scenarios, offering quantitative support for refined public health interventions in response to recurring COVID-19 waves.

Emergence of the reproduction matrix in epidemic forecasting

“…ventilation [18–20]), and on the imposed protection measures (e.g. contact tracing, repetitive testing and administration of vaccines [21–24]).…”

Projection of healthcare demand in Germany and Switzerland urged by Omicron wave (January–March 2022)

“…The described age-stratified compartmental model was developed towards the end of 2021 with the aim of providing a tool to delineate possible scenarios of the development of the Omicron wave, and help assess and anticipate possible critical issues for the healthcare systems in the two countries. The results described above were obtained prior to January 17, 2022 and rapidly communicated in Gorji et al (2022), leaving more comprehensive validation of the model with extended data-sets and more updated parameters to follow-up studies. We remark that here we stick to the evaluation of the model results obtained by January 17, 2022 (given in Figs.…”

“…We report our work, carried out prior to January 17 2022, that provided an early study on the Omicron wave impact (subvariant BA1), in Switzerland and Germany. For the sake of urgency, results were immediately communicated in an earlier version of the manuscript, made available in public repositories (Gorji et al, 2022). To analyze plausible epidemiological scenarios for Switzerland and Germany we devised specific dynamic compartmental models that were discretized and solved on contact matrices (Towers and Feng, 2012;Prem et al, 2017).…”

A distributed digital twin implementation of a hemodialysis unit aimed at helping prevent the spread of the Omicron COVID-19 variant

“…The widespread infection from the Omicron VOC poses a serious threat, particularly in hospitals and among healthcare workers. According to a European study, the risk of healthcare system saturation is critical, particularly with the Omicron VOC, and more refined mitigation strategies and techniques that safeguard the most vulnerable people and healthcare systems are urgently needed [12].…”