Case numbers still skyrocketing. The US and the world have set new daily case records each of the past two days.
US and world numbers don't show any uptick in deaths, but due to the 3-week lag, it's too early to see that sort of thing.
South Africa is the interesting one to watch, for a few reasons:
- Both cases and deaths followed pretty strong "spike" patterns, i.e. between waves both their cases and their deaths went down to a pretty low baseline.
- Their Omicron spike started basically Dec 1, so we have over a month for deaths to show up, and the peak of their spike was right around Dec 15-17, so right now should be basically 3 weeks out from their peak.
- Their daily case rates were basically the same between their Delta spike and Omicron spike, so we can do much more of an apples-to-apples comparison on death rates between the two waves.
What we see from the data is that Omicron has shown a marked increase from their baseline death rates. Baseline prior to the Omicron spike they were showing maybe 20-25 deaths per day on the 7-day MA. This has now risen to 89, with the last two days being both >100, so it's a 3-4fold increase over baseline.
However, the daily death rates during Delta were in the 350-400 range for the 7-day MA, so unless something really powerful shows up in the South African data, there could very well be a 3-4x reduction in mortality between Omicron and Delta, and that brings Omicron down to the seasonal flu range...
Obviously, there are caveats. South Africa is a much poorer country than the US, and we know they have much lower vaccination coverage. However being much poorer may significantly affect recorded case rates, where they may only be testing symptomatic people while the US tests people like crazy. They also have a lower obesity rate, so they could have confounding variables that reduce the mortality rate relative to what they see, despite the fact that the US has a much more capable health/hospital system.
But so far it's looking like Omicron, while still a virus that is dangerous and can still result in deaths, is significantly more benign than previous strains.
