For vaccines, the focus still seems to be largely the percentage of effectiveness, as if that effectiveness will be a reliable constant for each combination of particular vaccine, particular variant, and particular undesired outcome (case, symptomatic case, hospitalized case, oxygenized case, ventilated case, long covid, death, whatever). However, that effectiveness will almost certainly vary both with the attributes of the person (e.g. age, sex and `comorbidities`) exposed to the variant and with the environment, particularly the number of times the typical vaccinated person is exposed to the variant and how heavily exposed. For example, if we now observe, when omicron is starting to spread, that a vaccine shows 50% reduction in cases or hospitalizations or deaths, what will be the observed reduction when omicron is more prevalent, when it may be common for typical persons to be exposed multiple times per day for a few weeks? Could the 50% reduction still occur? Could the vaccine give a percentage of people super-immunity and the other people none at all? Otherwise, will the increased presence of omicron in the environment overwhelm the effects of the vaccine and drive that observed reduction from vaccination (or boosterization, or whatever) down significantly? What do the experts know from experience about this?

I wish Mr Biden nothing but success in his efforts to get us all doing the right thing, and I hope that his emphasis on vaccination now brings good results.

The reason seems obvious - it’s been only 25 days since the discovery of the first case. There haven’t been many outcomes yet to focus on - as far as I remember, the average time between symptom onset and hospitalisation is something like 10 days, depending on the age group.

Here's my speculation on the reason that the virus is seeming benignish so far... omicron requires fewer ACE2 receptors to bind to in order for it to infect a host(because of the incredible reproduction rate over delta once it takes hold). The younger are generally not taking as many precautions as the elderly did(elderly have more ACE2 receptors but have mostly been vaccinated or died already). so as the pool of eligible candidates for infection trend younger (fewer ACE2 required moves the bar of easy infection down younger) you have younger people generally having a better time with the infection because their immune system is slightly more robust. and that tracks with younger people (generally) during the delta wave and original variant; younger people tended to have fewer really bad outcomes.

You need a fully formed view to come to a conclusion based on details and those most qualified to do so are the least willing to do so.