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| A worker wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) sits behind a fence in a residential area under a COVID-19 lockdown in the Xuhui District of Shanghai, June 16. AFP-Yonhap |
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In a paper published in the online journal China CDC Weekly on the weekend, the researchers said a study of Omicron variant patients who initially had mild or no symptoms during the city's two-month wave earlier this year found that they were unlikely to develop severe illness and needed only moderate primary care.
Allocating less resources to milder patients would free up more care for worse cases, reducing strain on the overall system, the researchers found.
"Once medical resources are focused precisely on vulnerable populations, and non-vulnerable populations are given moderate primary care support, the adequacy of medical resources will be greatly optimized and enhanced, and the treatment of non COVID-19 will not be strained due to COVID-19 outbreaks," researchers from Shanghai's Huashan Hospital who co-authored the study wrote in an analysis published on their department's social media account.
The conclusions come after more than 620,000 people were infected and 588 people died in Shanghai during a massive outbreak of cases earlier this year.
In the outbreak, all people who tested positive ― irrespective of whether they were asymptomatic, had mild symptoms or were severely ill ― were put in central isolation or hospitals, swamping the city's medical system.
The researchers, including prominent infectious diseases expert Zhang Wenhong with Huashan Hospital, said the study, the biggest of its kind in China, indicated that if COVID-19 public health strategies were refined, the risk of cases overwhelming the medical system could be minimized.
"By providing some level of primary care support to this population [of milder cases] and reducing the overall healthcare expenditure on this population, the straining of healthcare resources during the peak of the epidemic can be avoided," the researchers wrote.
The team's findings were based on a study of 33,816 Omicron patients who were initially non-severe, not in acute stage of illness or not requiring frequent adjustment of treatment.
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| People wearing face masks stand in line for COVID-19 tests at a coronavirus testing site in Beijing, June 16. AP-Yonhap |
The patients were admitted to one of four hospitals in Shanghai between March 22 and May 3.
About 16.5 percent of those patients were aged 60 years or above, 27 percent had risk factors and 18.7 percent had comorbidities.
Among those with comorbidities, 77.4 percent had high blood pressure and 25.9 percent had diabetes. Nearly 97 percent of all the participants had fewer than two comorbidities.
More than three-quarters of the participants were ultimately diagnosed with asymptomatic infections.
For those with symptoms, the median duration of the symptoms was seven days.
Eventually 22 patients, or 0.065 percent of the total, developed severe or critical infections.
All of those who died were over 60 years old with underlying diseases, and many had not been vaccinated.
The researchers said that if a series of protective measures for vulnerable populations were taken, including adequate vaccine coverage, the rate of serious illness and death among these people could be "significantly and consistently" reduced.
"We still need to implement precise prevention and control for vulnerable populations to reduce the morbidity and mortality of such populations and to minimize the damage caused by Omicron," they said.
The team also said that compared with the Delta coronavirus variant, Omicron was less likely to infect lung cells and result in fewer cases of pneumonia and respiratory distress, but the study showed that young, vaccinated people could still develop pneumonia.
Researchers gave chest CAT scans to 780 COVID-19 patients suspected to have pneumonia and found 99 were positive in the scan, 11.1 percent of whom were younger than 40 and the youngest being 22.
Most of the young COVID-19 pneumonia patients had no underlying medical conditions and only one was unvaccinated.
"Although being younger, vaccinated, having no underlying diseases can serve as protective factors for progression to severe disease, these factors do not provide 100 percent protection from pneumonia," the researchers wrote in China CDC Weekly. (SCMP)
