Your assessments are very fair and I think you raise good points. I can tell you anecdotally (yes I will say that!) that what I am seeing on the ground is that there are no CoVID cases in the ICU. Where I am , delta went through in August and I have no desire to every repeat those 21 days — it was as bad as I have ever seen. I do think, however, that when it appears that 50% of Europe will be infected in 2 weeks, and when you see where omicron has blown through, it became absolutely the dominant strain — literally everybody (who tested) had it, and there was no increase in critical illness related to SARS or anything that looked remotely close to SARS.
So if it is this contagious and based on reports omicron gives robust antibodies against previous strains and deaths are down — in know someone else pointed out they are a lagging indicator — dealing with it for six weeks we would see it by now — I am comfortable that omicron proves the laws of epidemiology that mutations become more transmissible and less dangerous until it rips through the population and burns out.
This is clinically what we are seeing — but I do find it curious that it has shifted from LRI to URI. I have a lot of curiosity around that.
Have a good night!
Also Utah - ICU counts are continuing to decline slowly, completely oblivious to the surge. Even that has a very negative second derivative at this point. Three weeks and it starts fading to nothing.