The only miss information here is your comment.

>the virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated

According to gallup (which I hope we can agree is not some sort of alt-right outlet) the risk of an unvaccinated person needing to be hospitalized if they get covid is 0.89%. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

That is insanely low. That is just the risk of hospitalization, the % of those that are hospitalized that actually die from (not with) covid is even lower, which is a key distinction that your Reuters article doesn't make. Most hospitals are required to test patients for covid (if they are admitted), even if they are being admitted for something else (like a broken leg) if they come back positive then they show up in the stats even if they exhibit no covid symptoms and require no to little treatment from the hospital for covid.

The healthcare system is not remotely being overrunning by covid, it only appears that way because of these scary, missleading, numbers.

All I can say is that Omicron is not significantly less dangerous. This is actually shaping up to be worse than the Delta surge. If you believe Delta was serious, then this is too.

Take a look.

https://i.imgur.com/o3DJfN2.png

https://i.imgur.com/g8tyRdQ.png

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/09/us/omicron-ci...

These graphs are misleading because they do not accurately reflect the change in cases. Cases in the Omicron wave are probably closer to 10x the winter of 2021 than the 1.5x in those graphs, but testing sites have been overwhelmed and rapid tests are more widely available, leading most people to either test at home or simply give up.

For reference to a Covid prevalence measurement that isn't sensitive to testing artifacts, check out the Boston wastewater analysis: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

> For reference to a Covid prevalence measurement that isn't sensitive to testing artifacts, check out the Boston wastewater analysis:

This would be confounded by the greater viral loads for Omicron, wouldn't it?

40 hospitals in NY state we’re just forced to halt elective surgeries:

https://abc7ny.com/new-york-hospitals-stop-elective-surgerie...

That’s overrun in my book.

"The virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated" Absolutely, I very much agree with this but at this point in time everyone has access to the data and there is not much ore that can be done to make people choose to get vaccinated. Forcing people to choose to be vaccinated or lose their jobs when the primary person the vaccinated are endangering is themselves is not a good policy. People should be allowed to make their own choices at this point. No matter what we do the virus is here to stay.

"The vaccine does indeed reduce your propensity to spread the virus, although it doesn't eliminate the risk." agreed, but at this point Omicron is so incredibly transmissible that I think everyone is going to get it and it is impossible to eliminate all the potential infection vectors. I have to come down on the side of bodily autonomy at this point. If the virus was as deadly as ebola I would likely change my mind but at this point with the severity of omicron, I have landed here.

"The reason for lockdowns is not to make the virus "go away". It is to control the impact on the healthcare system." This is a very good point but there is no way to practically implement this in the current political environment. If we implemented a lockdown, we would still be telling the poorest among us, those we call essential that they still have to go to work to support the rest of us. In addition, there is just no way that states like Texas or Florida are going to agree to a lockdown. Are we willing to risk armed conflict over this? Personally I am not.

> The virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated

Do we know this about omicron? How dangerous is "very dangerous"? As it is with pre-omicron, CFR for COVID-19 was, pessimistically, 0.5-1%, less if you're not in an at-risk group. AFAICT we have no reliable numbers on "long covid".

For the record, I am not anti-vaxx, I am vaccinated, I'm just anti-using-science-as-an-ideology.

> Do we know this about omicron?

Here's the early numbers out of major cities:

https://i.imgur.com/g8tyRdQ.png

It's probably somewhere between 75% as serious and as serious as Delta, but we can't be sure yet.

The handwaving about 0.5% - 1% is ultimately not something I can address because it is opinion. A million Americans are dead from this and more deaths are coming. Reminds me of the Stalin quote.

Just coming from a scientist that is SUPER used to reading graphs -- It's really hard to tell from those graphs because the scariness of those graphs could wind up being (horizontal) scaling artifacts, because we know in the countries that led the omicron wave it seems to burn out faster... If the number of deaths tails out just as quickly, the CFR will wind up being way lower, since total deaths are an integral under the curve, and cases are point-in-time values.

Also, let’s define “very dangerous”. Every recovery chart I’ve seen shows a 98 percent or higher recovery rate: similar to a bad flu season.