Right. Half the death rate but with twice the cases, is still the same absolute number of deaths.
I should point out that there may be another confounding variable as it relates to the case/death relationship, especially in the US.
America seems to have a serious hard-on for COVID testing. It seems that the mantra is that everyone should be testing, all the damn time. Test for this event, test for that event, test in the event that you've turned testing into an event in its own right.
So we're probably catching TONS of COVID-positive people who are asymptomatic or just have the sniffles, many of whom are vaccinated, and almost none of whom have a serious chance of ending up in the hospital, ICU, or morgue.
So in a world where testing was mostly done for people who think they have a decent likelihood of having COVID, i.e. they are symptomatic or perhaps they're a close contact of someone known to have COVID, I would expect the deaths graph to mostly look like the cases graph, smaller, and smaller than we saw with Delta, with a 3-week lag, but generally the same shape.
With our insane testing regimen, however, it won't surprise me if the death curves appear even more muted than you'd expect based upon the shape of the cases curves.
