> Preliminary research indicates that Omicron has an 87% lower fatality rate.

1. 87% less of a lot isn't a little. It can still be a lot.

2. "Fatality rate" isn't a number that just floats in the air by itself. It's a factor in the equation deaths = case_count * fatality_rate, and the case_count term has skyrocketed.

3. Deaths aren't the only thing to worry about. Hospitalizations that don't result in a fatality are nothing to sneeze at. Ditto for other kinds of bad outcomes. Where's the concern about COVID-caused myocarditis?

There’s no way of winning with those like you. You just like the drama of the pandemic too much and want it to stay forever. Even if it killed 1 person a year globally, those like you would probably argue that “even one life is infinitely precious and we should be on lockdown to save it”. Perhaps you feel this is your opportunity of a lifetime to be righteous. Honestly, I am so fed up with so many of you around that I have been hoping for a global nuclear Armageddon between Russia and the USA just to shut all of you up. Don’t forget to wear your mask when you look at the strange bright light in the sky.

> There’s no way of winning with those like you. You just like the drama of the pandemic too much and want it to stay forever....Honestly, I am so fed up with so many of you around that I have been hoping for a global nuclear Armageddon between Russia and the USA just to shut all of you up.

I'm sorry, but it seems you're complaining about a straw man that lives only in your head. Also, there are much easier and more effective ways to deal with things like that than wishing for a nuclear war.

Thanks for your comment, though. It felt nice to read it for reasons you almost certainly didn't intend.

It is not a strawman if it speculates motivations, because people are rarely honest about their motivations, even to themselves.

> It is not a strawman if it speculates motivations, because people are rarely honest about their motivations, even to themselves.

In some contexts that may be true, but internet comments is not one of them.

The GP is just showing us the melodrama that's going on between some characters that live in his head. He was responding to them, not so much to me.

> Omicron has an 87% lower fatality rate.

That is likely due to so many people being vaccinated or recovered.

If you dropped Omicron on the world population in the middle of 2019 I strongly doubt it would be any more mild.

> A lot of the deaths occurring right now are still from patients that were infected by the Delta variant weeks ago.

I guess natural immunity isn't as consistent as vaccination though (which produces exactly zero shock amongst the world's virologists and epidemiologists) and also suggests that Omicron isn't intrinsically mild at all.

There is now strong evidence that Omicron is significantly milder than previous variants, independent of vaccination levels and natural immunity.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

What needs to be done is a comparative study during an overlapping period of Delta and Omicron infection to rule all out all the confounding factors that happen when looking at waves in entirely separate time periods.

That got done recently for transmissibility recently with the Danish study (which finds no difference in intrinsic transmissibility between Omicron and Delta and that the advantage Omicron has is entirely immune escape):

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...

Then your unvaccinated group that you're comparing to in the Delta and Omicron waves are equally susceptible to disease and any cryptic spread and immunity may be present but will be equal.

The South Africa study cannot do this which means they're comparing different time points and they have many confounding factors. That is not strong evidence.

Plus best they get is that Omicron is about 1/4 of Delta which is 1/2 of D614G which is still terrible. That is still just SARS-CoV-2 levels and not the factor of 10 that would turn it into influenza.