No, it absolutely is not a matter of anything other than how many corpses accumulate. How could it be otherwise? Ask the adult children of the parent who dies if they care if that death was from fewer cases.
Cases and hospitalizations have agenda. Dead is dead.
You are incorrect using emotional argument in a scientific debate. There is not room for that. Clearly whatever it is that causes death, the family is traumatized by. So much, so obvious. But the emotion does not help us to discern what is actually occurring.
You are stating there is a surge. The real question is how dangerous is it. As we analyze things like incidence and prevalence of endpoints, we can clearly discern that the virus continues to evolve to more contagious but less deadly. The numbers you bring up are numbers in a vacuum. Delta had a 1.5 - 2% mortality rate. Omicron is significantly less than 1/10 of 1%. Ergo the number of deaths as a function of number of cases is in fact lower, not higher as you propose using a pure endpoint count — in your argument the endpoint being death.
This does not allow for discernment of what is occurring. The context of data is what leads to defining what is true and what is not. What is true is that omicron is unequivocally less generous than delta, and confirms the theory of pandemic evolution — that variants tend toward less dangerous but more contagious than the original disease.