Covid-19 hospitalization risk doubles with Delta, UK study suggests
CNNCNN — A new study adds to growing evidence suggesting that the Delta coronavirus variant is not only highly transmissible, but also more dangerous. “The results suggest that patients with the Delta variant had more than two times the risk of hospital admission compared with patients with the Alpha variant,” researchers from Public Health England and the University of Cambridge wrote in their new study. “Emergency care attendance combined with hospital admission was also higher for patients with the Delta variant, showing increased use of emergency care services as well as inpatient hospitalization,” the researchers wrote. “These data confirm what we are seeing in clinical practice, namely that, in addition to the Delta variant being more infectious than the original or the Alpha variants, it is also causing more severe illness, in populations that previously would have had only mild infections,” Dr. David Strain, senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the study, said in a written statement distributed by the UK-based Science Media Centre. “The new study “measures hospitalizations as a surrogate marker of severe disease, and the findings are clear: the Delta variant increases hospitalizations compared to the Alpha variant previously prevalent in the UK,” Stamataki said.