Delta poses more hospitalisation risk than Alpha variant: Lancet

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 28

Patients with the delta variant of concern have more than two times the risk of hospital admission versus those with the alpha variant, suggest new findings from the UK, where Delta remains the predominant driver of Covid-19 upsurge, much like in India.

The study published in the Lancet today has ramifications for India, where the National Centre for Disease Control recently showed 90 per cent genome sequenced samples carrying the highly transmissible delta.

The latest study — the largest whole-genome-sequencing dataset for SARS-CoV-2 in a high-income country to date — found Delta was associated with over two times the risk of hospitalisation than alpha.

“Patients with the delta variant had more than two times the risk of hospital admission compared with patients with the alpha variant. 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 hospitalisation,” found the study that covered 43,338 sequencing-confirmed cases of alpha and delta variants in England from March 29 to May 23, 2021.

Silver lining in the research is — when studied by vaccination status, only the unvaccinated had a significantly higher risk with 74 per cent of those hospitalised unvaccinated.

“Our results suggest that outbreaks of the delta variant in unvaccinated populations might lead to a greater burden on healthcare services than with the alpha variant,” the authors say, in major implications for India, where Delta is the dominant variant and vaccine pace is low.

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