TL;DR: It hasn’t, yet. Expect Omicron to peak some time mid to late January. Severity looks lower, but we don’t know how much. South Africa is probably not a good predictor for the US, but the UK probably is.
Here is an article by Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. Basically: what he said.
Like many profesionals in the prediction business, he’s being very cautious in his predictions. I’ve been preparing to write something very similar, so just posting his is me being constructivly lazy 😀
Also, the dude’s got serous creds as well as a team backing him up, so the agreement with my course numbers based predictions is personally satisfying 😀
I’ll be giving a bit more details in my own analysis soon. As a preview, based on first pass, quick, casual caulcuations for Massachusetts (subject to change as I look deeper!), it looks like Omicron may result in about 1/3rd to 1/2 the death rate, but have at least 3x the case rate. This lower severity surely involves vaccination rates (about 75% of all ages in Mass, and 93% of the most at-risk ages). This is not necessarily going to be what the entire country experiences.
Also, expect death rates to increase as we stress medical systems, which is not something that the good Dr. Shaman gets into.
