The Traveller Effect on Early International Omicron Data

The Omicron variant is wrecking havoc in South Africa, but international cases thus far have been mild. While it may be due to South Africa’s low vaccination rate, it might also be due to the Traveller Effect.

Let’s examine the demographics of people who died of Covid-19 in the US. Here are the stats directly from the CDC’s website.

Almost 75% of all Covid-19 deaths in the US were people older than 65. If you expand that group to 50+, they represent almost 94% of deaths.

And that’s just talking age. What about health conditions? People with health problems like lung issues, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are all more vulnerable to dying of Covid-19.

Did you or your friends do any travelling during 2021? Mine did. Most people I know stayed in the country, but some went international. The older they were, the less likely they were to travel. But since that’s just anecdotal, let’s look at some travel statistics for South Africa.

So, the age group that’s most likely to die of Covid-19 (65+) only represents 2.65% of travellers to South Africa. This data was from July, but it’s safe to assume it was something similar in October and November.

What this means is that the initial mild infections in international cases might not be an accurate representation of the illness that Omicron will cause when it spreads through the general population.

It feels like people are waiting for an international severe case or an international death. Given the demographics of people that travel to South Africa, we are unlikely to see this from a traveller.

If 300,000 people travelled to South Africa in October and November and only a few hundred Omicron stowaways escaped on travellers, then maybe as few as five people were from the vulnerable age group. It’s possible none of these five had health problems that would make them more likely to die.

So, if you’re waiting for a traveller from South Africa to die of Covid-19 before you start taking the Omicron variant seriously, you can forget about it. It’s probably not going to happen.

We won’t know how serious Omicron is until it starts to spread through the general population in other countries. Yes, South Africa has much lower vaccination rates than Western nations, but many of the infected travellers were double or triple vaxxed. Of course, all this assumes that the hospitalization rate of Omicron is equal to the previous waves. It might be worse, or it might be better.

Data on the severity of Omicron won’t be known for weeks or months. It’s foolish to rely on reports of travellers with mild cases when judging the severity of initial outbreak data. We should expect travellers to have mild cases because they tend to be young and healthy.

Good luck out there and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.