David Wallace-Wells writes:

For all their limitations, the models right now are flashing bright red. Over the course of the pandemic, again and again, projections based on simplistic extrapolations of current trends have missed the mark when the trajectories turned. Sometimes this has been for the good, with dire warnings looking excessive after waves peaked and declined well before a full penetration of the population; sometimes, unfortunately, the turn has been in the other direction. But right now we don’t need models to tell us that the pandemic is taking a bad turn, and we won’t need to wait to see the projections validated, either. The speed of spread with Omicron is so fast that, when it comes to case growth, at least, the warnings are being validated already.

The relative virulence of the new variant is still clouded by enormous amounts of uncertainty. Only one patient has died with Omicron, thus far, and it is not entirely clear if the coronavirus was even the true cause of death. But in part this lack of severe outcomes reflects just how early in the wave we still are, even in South Africa; the variant was first identified there just three weeks ago, which means many of the early cases are still running their clinical course, and we don’t yet know what the outcomes will be. Hospitalization data comes earlier, and the news has been encouraging there, though experts have warned that what we see as milder outcomes may have less to do with the inherent virulence of the variant and more to do with the fact that more people who’ve caught it are carrying with them protection from vaccination or previous infection. The largest study to date on early South African data — somewhat strangely, it was conducted by an insurance company — found that, overall, those with Omicron were experiencing 29 percent less severe disease than those who got sick in the country’s first pandemic wave. Other, independent assessments have yielded lower — which is to say, more encouraging — estimates: Perhaps Omicron’s severity is lower by two-thirds, perhaps even less.

But a strain that is one-third as deadly and three times as catching lands you pretty quickly in the same spot, death-wise. And a strain that is 70 percent as deadly but five times as catching lands you somewhere a lot worse. [Continue reading…]