Risk of severe COVID-19 from the Delta and Omicron variants in relation to vaccination status, sex, age and comorbidities- surveillance results from southern Sweden, July 2021 to January 2022

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Abstract
We compared the risk of severe COVID-19 during two periods 2021 and 2022 when Delta and Omicron, respectively, were the dominating virus variants in Scania county, Sweden. We adjusted for differences in sex, age, comorbidities, prior infection and vaccina-tion. Risk of severe disease from Omicron was mark-edly lower among vaccinated cases. It was also lower among the unvaccinated but remained high (> 5%) for older people and middle-aged men with two or more comorbidities. Efforts to increase vaccination uptake should continue.