The current situation – 7490 new infections and fewer hospital patients

In hospitals, 41 fewer positive patients had to be treated on Friday than on Thursday. 2,339 infected people are currently in hospital, of which 125 are in intensive care units. That was seven less seriously ill than Thursday, but four more than last Friday. In total, there was a decrease of 199 infected people in hospitals in the past week.

A week ago – last Friday – 13,069 new infections were reported. There are currently 112,720 active cases in Austria, 48 more than the day before. There have been 5,387,830 confirmed cases in Austria since the start of the pandemic.

A total of 20,980 deaths
Authorities registered nine more deaths, last week there were 46 Covid deaths, the week before there were 88. In total, the Covid 19 pandemic has claimed 20,980 lives in Austria since it broke out. 232.4 people per 100,000 inhabitants died as a result of infection.

The effective reproduction number, which indicates how many more people an infected person is currently infecting, fell to 0.91 on Friday. It is therefore below the critical value of 1. This is apparent from the published estimate by experts from AGES and TU Graz. A week earlier, the position was 1.04. The estimated daily rate of increase of new infections is now decreasing and is minus 2.5 percent.

A total of 143,061 rapid PCR and antigen tests were reported in the last 24 hours, of which 116,584 were meaningful PCR tests. 6.4 percent were positive. On average there were almost 99,000 PCR analyzes per day in the past week, the positive percentage of the PCR tests was 6.4 percent.

Sub variants BF.7. emerging
As the geneticist Ulrich Elling of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) said in the “Mittagsjournal” on Friday, there are always new variants within the omicron group that are developing faster and faster, so that one speaks of a variant soup could be. The sub-variants BF.7., which currently has a 25 percent share in Austria, and the variant BQ.1.1., which was first found in Africa and has a share of about 2.5 percent, are emerging.

According to Elling, it is not yet possible to predict the characteristics of the new offspring, plus to expect that the pathogenicity will remain the same – however, the new variants are better able to circumvent the immunity of the vaccinated, but also of those who have recovered – BQ .1.1. is currently the strongest to rate here.