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- The Delta variant doubled the risk of hospitalization compared to the once dominant Alpha variant.
- About 74% of people in the UK-based study were unvaccinated and few were fully vaccinated.
- The study’s authors said getting people fully immunized was “crucial” to protect against Delta.
People who get sick with the Delta variant of the new coronavirus are more than twice as likely to be hospitalized as those who get the Alpha variant, suggests a large British study.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge and Public Health England who led the study, said in a statement Friday that Delta may be a “greater burden” on health services than the Alpha variant, “particularly in unvaccinated people and other vulnerable populations ”.
The article, published Friday evening in the Lancet Infectious Diseases medical journal, analyzed 43,340 cases of COVID-19. About 74% of cases involved unvaccinated people, while less than 2% involved fully vaccinated people. The rest concerned partially vaccinated individuals.
Delta is more contagious and increases your risk of hospitalization
Overall, just over 2% of people who contracted COVID-19 were hospitalized within 14 days of testing positive. The researchers found that the risk of being hospitalized was 2.26 times higher for people who were ill with the Delta variant, compared to Alpha, taking into account factors that may affect a person’s propensity to develop severe COVID-19, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic factors. They did not take into account the pre-existing medical conditions.
The results of the study focus on the risks for unvaccinated and partially vaccinated people. The authors said they were unable to draw firm conclusions about whether Delta increased the risk of hospitalization in those vaccinated because there were not enough vaccinated people admitted to the hospital. with COVID-19 during the study period.
Other research has shown that fully vaccinated people have a strong protection against hospitalization if they become ill with the Delta variant.
Delta is at least 50% more infectious than the Alpha variant, which overwhelmed UK hospitals over Christmas, and has additional mutations that help it bypass the immune response.
The study is the largest to date and the first to examine the genetic code of the virus in the lab to determine the variant – the most precise technique.
Delta was detected in the UK in March and overtook Alpha as the dominant variant in June. The proportion of Delta tests increased from 20% to 74% during the study period, which ran from March 29 to May 23, the authors said. Overall, they looked at 8,682 Delta cases and 34,656 Alpha cases.
The study confirms previous data from Scotland in June which found that Delta increased the risk of hospitalization compared to Alpha. Scottish researchers used an indirect measurement to determine the variant that caused COVID-19.
Vaccines are “crucial”
Dr Anne Presanis, one of the study’s lead authors, said in a statement Friday that getting a full vaccine was “crucial” to protecting yourself against Delta. “To reduce the risk of symptomatic Delta infection in the first place and, most importantly, to reduce the risk of serious illness and hospitalization of a Delta patient,” she said.
Dr David Strain, clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter, said in a statement to the Science Media Center on Friday that the study confirmed what “we are seeing in clinical practice”. Strain was not involved in the research.
“In addition to the fact that the Delta variant is more infectious than the original variant or the Alpha variant, it also causes more severe disease, in populations that would previously have had only mild infections,” he said. .
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