Does the fifth wave really treat us more favorably?

Until recently, the Minister of Health, Adam Niedzielski, warned that the daily number of infections may reach the limit of 100,000 or even exceed it. However, at least for now, it turned out that the limit of 60,000 had not been broken, and the dynamics of infections in the last week slowed down significantly. On the other hand, experts who prepare mathematical models of the Omikron waveform claim that at the peak, expected in mid-February, daily infections may be as high as 600,000 (although, of course, no one expects such reports).

Discrepancies are due to the testing system, or rather, the fact that it is not properly prepared to handle those interested in testing. This is shown by the data prepared by Łukasz Pietrzak, a pharmacist who also deals with the analysis of pandemic data. When in January just over 3.3 million tests were performed in the official system, Poles bought over 2.4 million of them only in pharmacies (tests are also sold by hypermarkets, discount stores and online stores). - The scale of underestimating the fifth wave is huge - notes Pietrzak.

While the decision to release covid beds for the needs of patients without COVID-19 should not raise any doubts, because hospitals have been alarming for weeks about the dramatic situation where there are no places for uninfected people, when a large part of the wards blocked for the purposes of the pandemic are unused, o so much the possible decision to shorten distance learning may turn out to be premature: even if we have indeed passed the peak (or the trend will turn any day now), the number of infections is still very high and schools are an important channel of transmission of the virus. So it may turn out that we will go back to the situation from November and early December, when remote learning was an undeclared reality in a large part of schools, where most classes were sent "to remote" and at the same time the fiction of full-time learning was maintained.