The world has been waiting for better data on Omicron. Looking for the turning point that suggests we might have seen the worst.

We couldn’t know if the South African experience would translate to the overweight, indoor and diabetic parts of the world given 60% in South Africa had already had Covid — plus it was summer, and that part of the world is more familiar with certain anti-virals.

But this is about as good as we could have hoped:

DailyMail, UK

And on hospitalizations

The hospitalization curve in the UK has just (maybe) started to decline, and if there are no surprises, then it appears Omicron is roughly kinda 10% as bad as Delta was.

Modelling Hospitalizations in the UK. Omicron

I know some will feel that this is no news at all and we could see this coming a long way back. But bear in mind that in South Africa, the country far ahead of us all, the deaths have only just plateaued the last three days (maybe).

The peak of infections in South Africa was December 17th. So that’s a full month’s lag.

Deaths may have only just hit the peak in South Africa. Graph OWID.

And right now, deaths are rising around the world, with the exception of Germany for some reason:

Source. OWID

There are plenty of ways this could have turned out differently. Even now, we don’t know the after effects or “sequelae” —  like the long Covid tally, or how long natural immunity will last, or whether there is some inflammatory, or autoimmune side effect. We are not at the end of the Omicron track yet. And as long as we suppress safe cheap drugs and inject 90% of the population with a leaky ineffective vaccine, the next variant-of-concern is in production right now.