Thread by @neoavatara

So, lets do a #COVID update since I have been either on vacation or...sick with COVID.

We are now at the highest new case/day of the entire pandemic. Omnicron changed everything. And the reality is we are still MASSIVELY UNDERTESTING, meaning these are undercounts.

Here is a heat map of hospitalizations, which nicely aligns with were the peak infections were about 3 weeks ago.

Here is the case map today. So we can expect continuing infections in the Northeast and Midwest for a while, but we are going to see surges of hospitalizations in the South again...likely by the middle to end of January.

Note there is little to no correlation between higher vax rates versus lower hospitalization rates.

That does NOT mean the vaccines aren't working. What it means is that there are still far too many unvaccinated, in every state.

I warned last summer that would be the case.

Unvaccinated are 13x more likely to die than vaccinated.

That said, Omnicron clearly has shown more break through infections, showing vaccines are only 5x more likely to stop infections. But there is still significant benefit.

Age is still the most important criteria.

That said, this wave is different; deaths are much lower, given the number of infections.

See these charts. First is NY, second FL. NY seems to have far more deaths this wave relative to Florida. Why?

My guess is Florida has more immunity to Delta. And Delta (not Omnicron) is causing most of the deaths in this wave; so NY's lack of Delta immunity is hurting them.

So what does this tell us?
1. Vaccines prevent deaths/hospitalizations, period. Not perfectly, but save hundreds of thousands of lives.
2. We are going to have more and more waves.
3. We have to stop living from wave to wave, and start to accept this is part of our world now.

No amount of mitigation is going to stop the next wave. No amount of vaccination is going to completely stop deaths. We should do as much as we can, but stopping society because of this is no longer a viable option.