Yeah deaths have been creeping up for the last week, hospitalizations for the last two and a half weeks. Hospitalizations are actually now at about 1/3 of the Delta peak. This is all roughly consistent with the timeline for previous strains (hospitalizations lag cases by about 10 days, deaths lag hospitalizations by about 2 weeks). The specific growth rates are a bit lower than what would be expected based on how quickly cases went up, though.

I think we'll see total hospitalization and death rates peak at anywhere from 50-100% of the Delta wave, but over a much shorter time period, commensurate with higher infectiousness but lower severity. The severity may be simply because it's no longer an immunologically naive population.

They might be, but the fact that the case rate is now falling means that whatever increase is seen in deaths will be very short-lived. That is something to be thankful for, since Delta has been killing large numbers of people worldwide over a very long period of time.

But we don't know why the case rate is falling so fast. It could be that people tend to isolate when everyone around them is suddenly having symptoms.

Do you have a link for those charts?

I can't find the ones I saw before, but the OWID charts show that deaths in South Africa are still rising, and Omicron case counts just started rising 3 weeks ago, so I'm still holding my breath. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Pretty good one here:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...

Don’t worry about it; he saw them.