we have a different demographic, make up of our country compared to ireland, the uk and south africa and we certainly have different rates of immunization and types of immunization here. particularly concerned about what is going to happen is omicron hit populations that have neither been previously infected nor have received vaccines. regardless of this good news, the reality is our hospitals across the country are already overwhelmed with the surge of delta patients. and so even a small increase in hospitalizations as omicron tears through our population is going to put many of us into disaster levels of care. can we just be a little more plain spoken about what it means when we say we have a different population. what exactly does a doctor mean when you say this is a different population than ireland or south africa? great question. so, it s a couple of things. one is that our age distribution
how risky this variant is in terms of how unwell people will be. ., , ., be. right now we still don t have good be. right now we still don t have good answers - be. right now we still don t have good answers for - be. right now we still don ti have good answers for this. be. right now we still don t i have good answers for this. it is true that in south africa there is cases that are much less severe that are not requiring the same hospitalisations, icu, stays, not the same association with deaths. however, south africa has a different make up in terms of age distribution than the uk, the rest of europe and then the us. so we are in valley very early days and we have to see how it plays out and it isn tjust about how severe it is even it if if it is slightly less severe than delta, we re going to see a tsunami of infections and that is going to put health systems under very severe duress. the other thing under very severe duress. the other thing we under very severe dures