Depending on how you look at the U.S. data for the latest COVID variant, the story it tells inspires either relief or dread. dwallacewells writes on an uncomfortable question about the Omicron endgame
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images It’s always dangerous, in a fast-moving pandemic, to take a freeze-frame of the present tense and trust that you can see the future in it all that clearly. In the last few days, there has been a wave of good news about Omicron: Cases appear to have peaked in New York and Boston, possibly D.C., and even perhaps the country as a whole.
Of course, the story is a bit more complicated than that. We can already see that this wave, however brutal, is almost certain to pass quickly. Many of those hospitalized are experiencing only “incidental” COVID — hospitalized for other reasons and diagnosed only after they were admitted.
When you have as many cases as we do now, that isn’t just a recipe for a rougher wave than has washed over Europe. It’s a recipe for something much more catastrophic.
First, the Times case study is small — just three cities and not necessarily representative ones. On the other hand, they are places with relatively high vaccination rates and levels of previous infection, both of which, in theory, make them less vulnerable to severe illness than the rest of the country, not more.
Testing issues and the incompleteness of our picture of Omicron spread may also scramble the analysis, since we may be missing a larger share of infections with this wave than previous ones. On the other hand, the country is now testing more than it has at any point in the pandemic, and even if it was the case that more cases were still being overlooked, that would only change our picture of the relative mildness of this wave, not the scale of its impact.
Consider the following numbers. At its Delta peak, the U.K. was recording an average of about 130 deaths per day, following from a case peak of around 47,000; with Omicron, the death total still hasn’t peaked but has reached an average of about 240, following a case peak of about 180,000. About a four-fold increase in cases has produced, so far, about a doubling in deaths, which are still rising. Even if we assume that U.K.
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