“So far, not a single person with Omicron has been admitted to hospital in Vienna,” Hacker told Austrian newspaper Standard. 

“This is the case for standard and intensive care wards and is quite remarkable,” he added.

There is a delay before seriously ill patients end up in hospital after becoming infected, but the data for the initial phase of the Omicron wave seems to provide some grounds for optimism.

As of Thursday, a total of 1,870 people had tested positive for the highly contagious Omicron variant in the capital to date, 540 of those cases were from the last two days. Omicron has been the dominant strain since St Stephen’s Day on December 26th.

Hacker is expecting to see record case numbers in January. He did not want to give specific figures, but in response to whether the capital could see 10,000 new infections per day, he said: “it will be like that”.

Inpatients are unvaccinated

Hacker also referenced statistics, which showed that for Vienna “more unvaccinated people were ending up in hospital [with Covid] than ever before”, thereby demonstrating that vaccination worked. 

Around 41 percent of the total population has had a booster vaccination so far and 71 percent have an active vaccination certificate.

From November 8th to 14th, there were 166 unvaccinated inpatients and 39 fully vaccinated inpatients with Covid-19 in non-intensive-care hospital wards. This compares with December 20th to 26th when there were 179 inpatients who hadn’t had a jab and just 19 who were fully vaccinated.

Cut quarantine period
Nonetheless, with case numbers expected to rise substantially in the country, the number of people off sick with Covid-19 or in quarantine could still become a problem even if these don’t translate into high numbers of hospital admissions.

Hacker is therefore calling for the quarantine period to be shortened to five days or a week and for quarantine rules to be relaxed.

Italy, for example, recently announced that it would scrap quarantine rules for vaccinated and recently recovered people who were in contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19. 

The Austrian Minister of Health was currently looking into relaxing the quarantine rules for triple-vaccinated people. This was announced by Austria’s Chief Medical Officer Katharina Reich on Thursday on Austrian news show Zeit im Bild 1.

A relaxation of the rules would have “to be consistent in a step-by-step approach” and was “quite conceivable”, said Reich, who heads up the Committee of the National Covid Crisis Coordination (Gecko) with Major General Rudolf Striedinger.

The regulations were tightened in mid-December with the arrival of the new variant and the quarantine period was cut again on December 19th. Since then, people who have been in contact with a person infected with Omicron only need to self-isolate for ten days again (down from 14 days under the tighter rules) and can take a PCR test to end the quarantine early after five days if they test negative. 

They are considered Category 1 (K1) contacts.

This is not the case with the previous Covid-19 variants – contacts of these are considered Category 2 (K2) and do not have to self-isolate. They are just asked to reduce their social contacts and be extra alert to symptoms.

READ ALSO:

• Austria extends lockdown for unvaccinated until January 10th
• Covid-19: What are the rules for New Year’s Eve in Austria?
• UPDATED: What are the rules for entering Austria right now?