- Hospital capacity is limited, staff burnout is real, and delayed treatments for non-Covid conditions are occurring. Given Omicron's tremendously fast spread, slowing spread even slightly helps.
- Infection isn't an all-or-nothing strategy. Innoculum, that is, the amount of virus you're exposed to, matters, and a smaller innoculum may reduce severity of symptoms.
- There remain many individuals who are immunocompromised or who have multiple risk factors for Covid.
- Though Omicron's severity is lower, it is not zero. Looking at South Africa, it appears that net total deaths are about 1/3 of previous Covid waves. South Africa's peak was early enough that we're probably seeing peak mortality about now.
- Further mutation of Covid is likely, and the more cases and more variants of virus are spread, the more likely those become. We've seen variants with greater severity (Delta) and greater infectiousness (Omicron). A variant combining those traits would be highly unfortunate.
There are countries which are likely to see major Omicron outbreaks. I've been watching India's new daily cases double every 3 days since January 4, growing from 59k cases then to 533k on 13 January, pretty much precisely as I'd projected. (I was, and am, very much hoping for that trend to break. Given India's pretty clear testing and data reporting issues, hitting a numeric target may not be especially significant. But the point remains that in a country of 1.4 billions, even with a relatively low incident fatality rate, India could be looking at 20--80 million deaths. More if healthcare services are overwhelmed.
Access to, and proper protocols for masks, could help.