David Wallace-Wells writes:

“Omicron is in retreat,” declared the January 19 headline of the New York Times’ Morning Newsletter, by David Leonhardt, which reaches millions of inboxes each weekday. That same Wednesday, according to Our World in Data, 3,830 new deaths were reported in the country — not just the highest figure in the Omicron wave but, putting aside a one-day post-Thanksgiving reporting anomaly, the highest since January 2021. In the week that followed, the deaths continued: A few days later, according to the Times, the figure was 3,866. A few days after that, 3,895. These are higher figures than were ever recorded during the Delta surge, which killed more than 200,000 Americans July through December, and they rank among the ten deadliest days of the entire pandemic.

The thing is Leonhardt wasn’t wrong. The wave, while still brutally lethal, was in retreat by some very important metrics. Nationally, the seven-day average of new cases had peaked January 14 at just over 800,000. In places like New York, Boston, and D.C., peaks had come even earlier, and though other states are still climbing worryingly — Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Wyoming — new cases in the country as a whole have fallen dramatically. (Of course, the previous record was just 250,000, a reminder that, with all of these curves “peak” does not mean “end” but, at best, “midpoint.”) At the front end of the Omicron surge, those emphasizing the relative mildness of Omicron pointed to hospitalization figures, rather than cases, then watched as those, too, set pandemic records (often switching back to cases as a preferred metric when those began telling the more optimistic story). Hospitalizations are falling now as well, though slowly, and we now may be at or near the peak of deaths from this wave, too. Which among other things means it may be more helpful to shift not from cases to hospitalizations but from national data to local, which is where all of us — despite the impulse to reduce or extrapolate everything to national politics —actually live. For people in many of the country’s biggest cities, those case graphs are much more reassuring, with new cases at or below the level they were before the Omicron surge. The rest of the country will get there soon.

But however simply we want the pandemic to speak to us, invariably it speaks instead in tongues, inviting interpretation and contestation — some of it partisan, some of it principled, some of it self-interested. This has been the case for the past two years, when we often pretended complicated epidemiology presented self-evident policy and behavioral demands: as conservatives argued at the outset, the disease was not all that threatening to the young and middle aged, though, as liberals argued at the same time, the threat it represented to the old was so monumental it demanded a coordinated response; efforts to mitigate spread had a clear effect, but not such a large effect that they could bring surges quickly to heel or that the logic was always obvious to all; the vaccinated were very well protected against Delta, and yet there were a nontrivial amount of breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths, mostly among the very old; and nationwide, despite widespread vaccination, especially among the elderly, thousands were dying each day at rates much higher than observed in Europe, producing death totals that would’ve horrified us earlier in the pandemic, and indeed did, but which had already become more like slightly irritating background noise to those who felt personally safe with their shots. [Continue reading…]