It hurts my brain to hold these two facts in my head at the same time. (1) Being vaxxed and boosted decreases your odds of death from COVID by 99%. (2) US COVID deaths are now running 2/3 as high as the pre-vaccine peak, and almost all of them are avoidable with free injections. My pre-pandemic self would not have believed this is possible.
CASES - Many parts of the country are post-peak and on their way down, especially large cities. Rural areas are peaking about now, and should mostly be on the decline within a week or so. For now, COVID rates are still crazy high in many parts of the country.
HOSPITALIZATIONS - It does look like hospital admissions and total patient counts for COVID have both peaked, about a week earlier than I would have expected. This should mark a turning point for our healthcare system. The next several weeks are still going to be rough, but by late February things should be getting back to whatever normal is.
DEATHS - Still climbing, but given the hospital stats, they should peak within days, probably short of the 3000 per day average I feared we'd hit. It's going to take a while for the numbers to come down; the January and February death tolls are going to be ridiculously high.
MID TERM OUTLOOK - I'm comfortable doing unmasked activities like indoor restaurants when confirmed case rates are below 10/day per 100k. I'd probably relax that to 20 given Omicron/vax severity data and if the healthcare system isn't overloaded. Remember that reported rates roughly reflect infections that occurred 7-10 days earlier. If your local rate is dropping 50%/week, a case load of 50 would suggest that it's probably already OK. Several states are very near that level, mostly in the northeast, and much of the country will be there in mid to late February.
March through the fall ought to be pretty much back to normal in just about every way.
LONG TERM OUTLOOK - So many unknowns. How long will Omicron BA.1 immunity hold? How long will boosters hold? Will a 4th shot be called for, and will it be Omicron specific? Will BA.1 immunity protect against BA.2?
My guess is that we'll see a seasonal epidemic again, but our immune systems will keep the number of hospitalizations and deaths fairly low. If so, it will probably make sense to mask up and/or skip very large crowd situations, but I don't expect a heck of a lot beyond that.
NEW BA.2 VARIANT - This has been getting a fair amount of press. BA.2 is a type of Omicron (unless they change the naming system). It apparently evolved before we detected the original Omicron BA.1. It has roughly a year's worth of differences from BA.1, which is really, really weird if BA.1 evolved in a single, immune compromised individual. This is starting to make the hypothesis of a mouse or other host make sense...that Omicron's branches evolved in an animal population and then jumped back to humans.
So far, not much is known. Early data were conflicting on its spread, but it now appears to be even more contagious than the original Omicron, and it's not clear exactly why. (Is it just better at spreading in general? Able to re-infect people who had Omicron?) Early data suggests that vaccines are slightly better against it than they are vs. original Omicron.
Denmark has a lot of BA.2, and they're seeing high rates of hospitalization...but their case counts are unbelievably, off-the-scale high so it's not clear that it's any worse.
My guess is that, if BA-2 continues to spread, it may flatten the downslope of our case counts for a couple of weeks, but hopefully not much more than that. As with the early Omicron days, we'll know a lot more in a couple of weeks.