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Apparently night sweats are now being listed as an Omicron symptom.

Yeah, I just looked at the national numbers on Worldometers. Yesterday was the highest daily case total of the entire pandemic.

Omicron is just ripping through the population.

This will IMHO lead to some spikes in hospitalizations and deaths, just based on sheer numbers, and mostly unvaccinated IMHO.

We'll see lower deaths as a percentage of infections than Delta, on that I 100% agree.

But the Delta case numbers maxed out at <200K per day nationally. Yesterday we had national numbers of 572K infections, and we're still in the very early stage of this spike.

Now, will we see the same number of deaths per day as Delta? I'm not sure. The number MAY be lower than Delta due to the apparent much lower mortality of Omicron. The number MAY be higher if case numbers shoot even further skyward.

But either I still think we're going to see death numbers jump from where they are today, just because of sheer numbers of infections.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

If you look at South Africa, there are a number of very different circumstances...

• South Africa's Delta spike had already worked its way through and cleared, and this was reflected in deaths. Their baseline is lower.
• South Africa had MUCH lower vaccination rates than the US.
• South Africa's Omicron spike started about 3 1/2 weeks ago, and they are just now showing an uptrend in deaths. Given there's typically a 3 week lag between cases and deaths, that makes sense.
• South Africa's Omicron spike, as reflected in cases/day, was roughly similar to their Delta spike. Whereas in the US it's now MUCH higher in cases/day. This could be due to more testing in the US; I'm not sure.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/

Literally everything I see suggests that Omicron will be much more mild for us than Delta. But yesterday's new case rate being 3x what we were logging during Delta makes me concerned that a lower percentage multiplied by a higher rate will still be rough.

That said, I'm living my life. I'm now triple-jabbed and not really worried about it.

UK is a better comparison because like the US, they've had a constant case rate and pretty constant death rate for a couple months after the primary Delta spike.

That said, the UK is only ~2 weeks removed from the start of their Omicron spike. And just recorded on Dec 30 a higher per-day death total than any previous time during the Delta wave.

(Note: this is likely a combination of lagging Delta and new Omicron infections--but that's would likely also be true of the US as our Delta deaths haven't been dropping that quickly either.)