How deadly is omicron?

From the first UK death reported on December 13, we are, as of Dec 21, still doing pretty well.

The virus doubles every 2 days, and we were counting 14 deaths on Dec 20. From the 45000 confirmed cases, only 129 ended in hospital and 14 died. That is, roughly, one death every 3000 cases.

For comparison, the rough estimate for previous versions of COVID-19 is one death in 500 people , or 0.2%, which I have calculated in February 2020 and published on this blog since March 2020.

Assuming that
-- all people are infected with the Delta variant, which is almost true in some countries like Romania and not true in Germany,
-- no untested people are infected with Omicron, which is certainly not true. A reasonable estimate for the total number of British cases is 2 million a day, and doubling every 2 days.

Under the above assumptions, omicron will still be 6 times less deadly than Delta, which gives a very rough upper bound.

As people live roughly 30 000 days (think 100 years x 300 days/year), you do expect 1.5 deaths for every 45000 days lived and 60 for every 2 000 000 days lived. If there are indeed 2 000 000 daily cases, and only 14 deaths, Omicron must prevent people from dying. This is, however, unlikely. Some of the positives who died of other causes may have not been tested for Omicron. Still, a dead person is far more likely to be tested than a sneezing one.

Thus... Omicron is now a normal cold. It will spread and infect the whole British population in a few days. Europe will soon follow. Hopefully, and likely, Omicron infection confers immunity against deadly Delta and will lead to its elimination. I believe the pandemic will end this year. Heavily mutated African variant Omicron will join the 200 cold viruses that plague us, without standing out. Merry Xmas everyone!

And what will come next? one can only hope for a less frightful new year with a chance to recover and move on. We've had an out of proportion reaction to the bird flu, then came the swine flu, and now from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's time to move to on to ... well... other pandemics. The good news is that they've been fairly rare in the past.