I believe the scientific consensus is that there isn't enough data to discount that theoretical concern. There's still too much uncertainty on how things will pan out, so the recommendation is boosters + some restrictions. They're not going to make a bet when people's lives are at stake, which seems reasonable to me. With more data coming out, I personally do hope we find that that concern is very unlikely. The situation is changing drastically day-by-day.

They are going to make decisions based on incomplete information when people's lives are at stake, decisions where deciding wrong can have material consequences to lives and livelihoods, because choosing not to act is itself a decision.

I do think that the decision that was made to keep pushing boosters and basically do nothing else is probably the correct one, but not because it was the default thing to do and we have to wait until there's incontrovertible evidence that the default action will lead to ruin before doing anything else.

SA severity may not be representative because of greater prior immunity and a younger age skew.

Exhibit B will be the UK. Their cases started spiking about two weeks ago. So far their hospitalizations haven't budged and are even a bit lower than they were a month ago, less than a quarter of their pandemic peak[1]

[1]https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

Hospital admissions are actually up a little: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ (parent link of the one you provided).

That said, deaths are still dropping, and have been dropping since November, which was a local minimum in case numbers.

The pertinent fact, I think, is that the UK is vaccinating like crazy, coming up to 1m boosters per day recently (total population just short of 70m IIRC), even 12-18 year-olds are getting jabbed now.

If you're looking at the UK the daily numbers for London (which is ahead of the rest of England, and the rest of the UK) are here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...

Thanks. Looks like you can filter my link by London as well, which shows hospital admissions have doubled in the last 10 days from about 1/6 to about 1/3 of the previous peak (though patients in hospital is lower at 1/4, possibly reflecting shorter stays but hard to say). London cases have continued spiking since but may possibly be peaking now (not sure how much lag there is in backdating reported cases here) so it will be interesting to see how much the hospital numbers rise from here.

England had high prevalence during the Summer, so not even them, maybe Denmark

That is skewed by the vaccinations of course.

Comparing SA with itself, omicron looks less severe than delta.