Waiting for conspiracy theorists to claim that the Omicron variant was the first test of this technology since it was fairly mild and spread so quickly giving most people who caught it some immunity against other COVID strains that are deadlier.
Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e4.htm?s_cid=mm...
What seems more important is how conveniently it can prove a point that the person already is trying to push forward.
The reason is because diagnosis is almost never done randomly, but instead relies on different avenues like hospitalization data. So you tend to already be biasing yourself to severe outcomes because milder cases are not going to end up getting diagnosed. In omicron's case this effect has been extreme as things like sewage samples showed dramatically higher rates of of the disease than were being officially reported. In the study you mentioned it determined diagnosis using:
"CDC used data from three surveillance systems to assess U.S. disease related to COVID-19 during December 1, 2020–January 15, 2022. COVID-19 aggregate cases and deaths reported to CDC by state and territorial health departments¶ were tabulated by report date.* ED visits with COVID-19 diagnosis codes were obtained from the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP).†† Hospital admissions and inpatient and ICU bed use among patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 were obtained from the Unified Hospital Data Surveillance System."
So your numbers are biased to heavily rely on things like hospitalization data, which is going to make the numbers borderline useless for trying to evaluate the overall mortality rate. To be fair I'm not really attacking the study either. Like I said this is a problem that really can't be solved in any way other than an involuntary lottery with mandatory testing + reporting + profiling/classification, which is something I'd expect to see in China, but not the US - for better and for worse.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/234736/people-with-omicron-v...
It says the risk of death with Omicron is 69% lower than with Delta. Among the unvaccinated, the risk is 80% lower than with Delta.
These numbers jibe with the statistics on case rates and mortality that we've seen over the last three months, when Omicron has been dominant.
I suspect the difference would be much more pronounced if we were to account for asymptomatic cases. Looking at wastewater measurements, which have been a good proxy for (and predictor of) case rates, we see far fewer confirmed cases, relative to virus levels, during the Omicron phase than we saw during prior variants. The ratio of deaths to wastewater virus levels is about 1/10th of what it was with Delta.
https://twitter.com/stevensalzberg1/status/14792575379208355...