As a point of comparison too about 690k Americans die of heart disease a year, or a rate of about 13k deaths from heart disease a week.

Currently the 'mild' omicron strain of the virus is killing more people per week than the number one killer of Americans (heart disease).

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Usurping the top spot for causes of death in a week is not mild by any means.

Your numbers are way off. Many of the deaths last week weren't necessarily from Omicron. Some were patients infected by the Delta variant in previous weeks before Omicron became completely dominant.

Omicron has been like 90%+ of the cases reported for the last month in almost every jurisdiction. A month ago you might have been able to say that but today it's pretty clear that almost all the cases will have been Omicron.

Terminal patients don't die immediately, it usually takes several weeks. Omicron only crossed the 90% threshold of sequenced cases the week of 01/01/2022.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...

Yes, and deaths have been steadily rising since then.

>The US lost 15K people last week to Omicron.

Not true. You're referring to all Covid deaths, not Omicron. We are still seeing the Delta strain lethality in the numbers.

> The US lost 15K people last week to Omicron.

Bullshit. There is no data to suggest all of those deaths were from omicron, and no reason to believe that's the case either. Don't spread misinformation.

Take your argument up with the New York Times, their death tracker is showing that ~15k people have died from COVID in the last 7 days: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html Count up the daily counts yourself and check.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You have provided no evidence that 15k, as reported by one of the most reputable new organizations in the world, is wrong or should be considered misinformation.

I'm not debating the Covid death number. You specifically called out omicron, while none of the actual data does so. There's no data (that I'm aware of) breaking out the US deaths by variant.